Ritual Space Research Articles

How Did Rituals Change with the Changing Ritual Places During the Second Millennium BC in Southwest England?

This study explores the transformation of ritual spaces in southwest England during the second millennium BC, focusing on the transition from monumental structures to residential settlements. Initially, ritual activities predominantly occurred within barrows and ring-cairns. By the Middle Bronze Age, however, these activities shifted towards houses and settlements, reflecting broader changes in architectural practices and social dynamics. This research examines the implications of these shifts through archaeological findings and literature review, highlighting how rituals became integrated into daily domestic spaces and the continuity of ritual practices through the reconfiguration of abandoned settlements into monument-like structures. The findings suggest that the evolution of ritual spaces was closely tied to the socio-spiritual landscape of the community, revealing significant insights into the cultural and social dynamics of prehistoric Europe.

On Scrolls, the Visual, and Visuality in Jewish Art

Abstract This article investigates the images of paired scrolling patterns recurring in the design of Jewish ritual spaces and objects. It explores a facet of non-narrative visual expression within Jewish visual culture. The chronologically and geographically disconnected depictions of similar paired scrolled patterns on Jewish artifacts exemplify the process of creating and recreating symbolic meanings based on the mimetic qualities of an image. In their various renditions and contexts, volutes in their resemblance to growing plant branches enacted visual references to the vital powers of nature as a promise for resurrection and a metaphor for the vitality of Judaism and the Mosaic law. The Jewish manifestations of symbolic scrolls emerged in surroundings that maintained classical architectural vocabulary containing volutes and shared the Christian topos of the flourishing cross visualized in its arboreal or vegetative renditions. This very act of construing of a non-narrative visual sign of a couple of spirals aims at reaffirming visual evidence as a meaningful source in its own right.

Infrasecularity in Stardew Valley

ABSTRACT Stardew Valley is a role-playing and farm simulator video game released by sole creator Eric Barone (online alias ConcernedApe) in 2016. This paper aims to apply an infrasecular (della Dora, V. 2018, “Infrasecular Geographies: Making, Unmaking and Remaking Sacred Space.” Progress in Human Geography 42 (1): 44–71) lens to the analysis of sacred spaces in Stardew Valley. Della Dora’s (2018. “Infrasecular Geographies: Making, Unmaking and Remaking Sacred Space.” Progress in Human Geography 42 (1): 44–71) work on infrasecularity stresses the layered nature of sacred spaces. Different belief systems may be present in a single sacred space that interact with each other over time. This paper analyzes some of the game’s spiritual spaces, including magical ritual spaces, as well as spaces dedicated to reverence of in-game deity “Yoba”. This paper’s methods include auto-ethnography and narrative analysis.

Dog as a part of ritual space in Przeworsk culture settlements: A zooarchaeological case study of Sławsko Wielkie, Poland

So-called “dog burials” represent a common phenomenon discovered on many sites dating to the late Iron Age in Central Europe. The article focuses on zooarchaeological analysis of skeletal dog remains from Sławsko Wielkie, site 12 (Poland), a settlement of Przeworsk culture, dated to the La Tène and Roman periods (3rd century BCE – 5th century CE). Although these deposits were often discussed in the older archaeological literature regarding the ritual sphere of Iron Age societies, they still lack more systematic zooarchaeological research. In this study, we present the results of the research focused on morphotype and life conditions of the Iron Age dog population from the Polish Lowlands. A broad spectrum of methods is proposed, including biometry, age of death and sex estimations, observations of pathological alterations, and contextual and comparative analyses supplemented with radiocarbon dating.

From Stupa to Pagoda: Re-Examining the Sinification and Transformation of Buddhist Monuments from Indian Origins

This study conducts a comparative analysis of Buddhist sacred structures throughout Asia, focusing on the historical development, regional disparities, and the cultural sinification process of stūpas, caityas, and pagodas. Specifically, it delves into the origins, definitions, and terminologies of early Buddhist monuments, such as stūpas/mahācetiyas and caityas/cetiyas, emphasizing their Indian origins. The research further explores the adaptation and reinterpretation of these original Indian concepts as they spread to East Asia, morphing into new forms, such as pagodas and Buddha halls. It examines the subtle shifts in terminology and the altered meanings and functions of these monuments, from their Indian origins to their sinified representations in East Asia. The transformation of Indian Buddhist monuments through local culture and technology into East Asian architectural forms is investigated, offering a detailed perspective on the dynamic transformation of sacred spaces in Buddhism. This illustrates the religion’s adaptability and integration with the local cultures of ancient East Asia. By analyzing the terminologies and symbolic meanings associated with the architectural transition from stūpa to pagoda, the study argues that sinicized ritual spaces in East Asia have adopted architectural types from pre-Buddhist traditions to represent Indian spaces, thereby highlighting the nuanced changes and the continuous adaptation of sacred Buddhist architecture.

Understanding dark tourism rituality (DTR): scale development and validation

ABSTRACT Dark tourism has long struggled with the moral conundrum of how death and violence can be seen as tourist attractions. However, ‘rituality’ can be considered to answer this conundrum. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study developed a dark tourism rituality scale (DTR Scale) with 12 items in four dimensions: ritual space experience, ritual element experience, ritual participation experience, and ritual significance experience. These dimensions demonstrate the process of dark sites’ transformation from the ‘unacceptable’ to the ‘sacred’. For the first time, this study quantifies the dark tourism process, which constructs its legitimacy and significance through rituality. This study reveals not only the individual dark tourists’ psychological experience, but also the political and economic characteristics of dark tourism rituality, and provides a systematic and measurable theoretical reference for future theory and practice.

Negotiating Heteronormativity: Transgender Women Navigating through Ulwaluko: The Rite of Passage to KwaXhosa Manhood

This qualitative study explores how five transgender Xhosa women navigate identity negotiations and cultural belonging within the profoundly gender-regulating ritual of ulwaluko KwaXhosa, male initiation to manhood. Data generation employed semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Despite acute violence enforcing masculine heteronormativity, findings reveal remarkable resilience as participants subtly expand gender pluralisms during the ritual through quiet defiance and feminine self-expression. Their profound liminality reveals fluidity within the ritual space. Analysing lived negotiations at the crossing lines of cisheteropatriarchy complicates Western gender theory and signals possibilities for radically inclusive African epistemologies recognising pre-colonial legacies of fluid gender diversity. Findings recommend that cultural gatekeepers foster compassionate pluralism and collective courage to transform exclusionary rituals towards radical inclusion.

임경업 서사의 역사 인식과 결핍 요소의 장르별 특징 연구

This study discusses how “deficiency” is accepted and expressed in the jeons(傳) and novels, legends, and shamanism in the ‘Im Gyeongeop narrative’. It defines and analyses Im Gyeongeop’s failure as a “deficiency”.
 Im Gyeongeop, a historical person, failed and died unfairly while pursuing loyalty to the Ming(明) dynasty. Such failures and frustrations make ‘Im Gyeongeop Jeon’ a narrative of deficiency. Im Gyeongeop has two deficiencies. The first is the ‘deficiency of continuing the reality of the ideal world,’ Im Gyeongeop pursues his ideological ideals. He goes to Ming for ideology, but his pursuit fails as Ming falls. This frustration leads to a ‘deficiency in the existing ideal world’ for Im Gyeongeop. The second deficiency of Im Gyeongeop is ‘unfair death’. ‘Unfair death’ has two meanings: one is that he was framed, and the other is that he had to die when he could not have died. “Deficiency of persistence” in the real world is the second deficiency.
 A legend is characterized by historicality and evidence. In the legend of a historical person, that person can be evidence. It is decorated based on historical facts, and real people’s stories also meet history. Im Gyeongeop legends can be categorized as birth, growth, activity, and death. In the birth story, Im Gyeongeop’s father often appears, and it is highly related to Feng shui(風水). These legends create a deficient element in the Gyeongeop because his father gets an ideal spot but breaks taboos. This story tells us that legend-tellers identify the cause of Gyeongeop’s failure with narrative logic. The growth story explain why Im Gyeongeop couldn’t see the secrets of nature(天機), and in the activity story and the death story, we find an attempt to find the cause of the deficiency. The Im Gyeongeop legends contain content that search for the cause of the deficiency in Im Gyeongeop. The legends created a fictional world free from facts, unlike jeons and novels. However, the legend tellers also had to be in historical times.
 In the West Sea(西海), Im Gyeongeop is worshipped along with the ‘Croaker catching folktales.’ However, there are no deficient elements of Im Gyeongeop in the ritual space. In shamanic thinking, Im Gyeongeop has no deficiency. We can infer the reason through the metaphorical meaning of the West Sea. Im Gyeongeop fled to Ming through the West Sea. The West Sea is a ‘liminal space’ in which the realistic space is transferred to an ideological space. Gyeongeop could be worshipped because the West Sea was a liminal space for the Gyeongeop. Gyeongeop does not show a deficiency in shamanic thinking because it is made in a space that transcends reality. Gyeongeop, in shamanic thinking, is a being out of historical time.
 Jeons, novels, and legends were not free from history. However, Gyeongeop was free from historical time. Gyeongeop’s deficiency in the liminal space was placed in a ‘post-historical’ situation. And the deficiency disappeared.

조선시대 설행된 여제(厲祭)의 제장 연구

The purpose of this study is to re-examine Yŏ-je(厲祭) by targeting Yŏdan( 厲壇) of the Hansungbu(漢城府, Hanyang area) during the Joseon Dynasty. Yo ̆-je is a ritual to appease Yo ̆-gui(厲鬼), who was considered to be the source of plague and disaster. Since space(空間) and symbols(象徵 物) were not carefully discussed in the existing studies, this study focuses on ritual space and ritual symbols. Therefore, this study attempts to clarify the cultural value of death inherent in Yŏ-gui, focusing on material culture. Joseon Dynasty attempted to build a new Yŏ-dan from the beginning of the dynasty. Yŏ-dan had begun to be built in the 15th century, but it was shaped according to the formality by etiquette in the 16th century. In Hanyang, ritual spaces were located outside the four gates. It can be divided into permanent and temporary space. The permanent Yŏ-dan was located in the Bukgyo(北郊) outside the ChanguiMoon(彰義門) and the temporary Yŏdan was located in Samgyo. Yŏ-dans of Hansungbu were built in the same form of Youngsungdan(靈星 壇). Yŏ-je was held in Yŏ-dan in Bukgyo after ceremony of Seonghwang(城 隍) to Yŏ-dan in Namgyo(南郊). Seonghwang is god of the other world, he places a role in bringing MusaGui(無祀鬼) together. As for the arrangement structure of the altar, memorial tablet of Songhwang was placed facing south, tablets of MusaGui were placed left and right of Seonghwang on the lower altar facing each other. The number of tablets of MusaGui was 12 in the beginning of the Joseon Dynasty under the influence of Ming, but it changed to 15 in king Sejong period. I guess that types of sorrow abnormal death reflected sense of value of the contemporary people were added. This study seeks to value Hansungbu's Yo ̆-je in that it has developed its thesis from the perspective of material culture. The purpose of this study is to re-examine Yŏ-jeby targeting Yŏ-danof

The Guli: A Shrine of Fluctuating Agencies. Materiality, Spirits and Psychosomatic Experience in the Afro-Amerindian Religion of Dugu

The present article explores how the construction of a guli, the spirits’ shrine and the central ritual space par excellence in the Afro-Amerindian religion of Dugu, reveals a material-spiritual dialectic between the spirits of the dead and spirit mediums. I argue that the anthropomorphizing of the guli occurs not only through intense, repetitive ritual activity but also through the potent association of embodiment and uncomfortable psychosomatic experiences. Contrary to simply attributing humanity to the guli for representation of the divine, my ethnography shows that the shrine also transforms into a material extension of the practitioner, creating a triadic configuration of materials, bodies, and spirits. In this manner, the Garifuna shrine gives rise to two ontological possibilities of animation: being ritually “ensouled” with human substances and invisible forces and becoming animated when it manifests in the medium’s body.

Yupik Spells and the Yupik Language in the Contemporary Religious Ritual Context

Abstract It is generally believed that if the languages of indigenous peoples of Siberia are preserved anywhere, it would be within the spheres of traditional environmental management: reindeer husbandry, hunting, fishing, etc. However, among Yupik communities in coastal Chukotka, another domain where the Yupik language remains in use is the religious (ritual) sphere—in particular, in various practices for communicating with the spirits of ancestors. This article focuses on Yupik spells, and, more broadly, the Yupik language in a modern ritual context. This allows us to identify and reflect on some characteristic features of the indigenous ritual space that are often insufficiently discussed in ethnographic literature: secrecy and indeterminacy. In addition, the article raises key issues surrounding family memory and heritage as well as the (dis)continuity of ritual knowledge.

Re-wilding Ritual: An Archaeological Study of Plants in Ritual Contexts in the Traprain Law Environs, Scotland

ABSTRACT The study of European prehistory has often associated natural objects as menacing presences rooted in fears concerning, at a basic level, continued subsistence and combative conciliatory ritual practice. Nevertheless, in this time, ritual is imprinted upon entire landscapes with natural objects manipulated to construct ritual spaces. This article considers the nature and purpose of natural objects, specifically plant species, within prehistoric ritual practice in Scotland through consideration of the Traprain Law environs, East Lothian. Within prehistoric contexts, the Traprain Law environs are formed partly through the physical manifestations of ideology in a network of ritual sites. In this context, plants as natural objects are a community integral to ritual networks, whether through ritualized clearance, symbolic usage in cremation, votive offering, or deposition prior to site abandonment. There are many ways in which plant remains occupied space within ritual taskscapes in prehistoric Scotland.

Pigeons at the Bedside: Lucumí Negotiations around Ritual Space in the Hospital

ABSTRACT: In the latter half of the twentieth century, south Florida became a hub of Afro-Cuban religious practice. The influx of Cuban immigrants has influenced healthcare institutions in the area. This article explores how devotees of one Afro-Cuban religion, Lucumí, popularly known as Santería, create space within hospitals to conduct religious rituals that facilitate the healing of patients. It argues that the creation of space for hospital rituals is a counter-hegemonic practice that can be mapped onto the relationship that Lucumí historically had to the Catholic Church, one of being both seen and unseen within this hegemonic institution. Through an analysis of the "symbolic power" embedded in language usage to create unsanctioned ritual space in the hospital, I build on Pierre Bourdieu's work by that title. In examining three types of space—secret space, talking space, and familiarity space—this article highlights the counter-hegemonic practices used to heal Lucumí patients in south Florida.

From Hucksters to Holy Men

Abstract Men who roamed Japan’s mountains, conducting austerities for the benefit of themselves and others, have been historically viewed along an opposing set of extremes, ranging from wonderworkers, immortals, and other Buddhist ideal types to charlatans, social deviants, and subhumans. The ascetic’s ritual space—the mountains—functioned as a geographical other that could either arouse Buddhist awakening or strange, demonic forces. Against this extreme ambivalence toward mountains and mountain ascetics, organized religion offered a means to transcend the margins and find a secure place within society. After examining opposing depictions of medieval ascetics, this article explores an attempt within Shugendō to thoroughly remake their image. While the institutionalization of Shugendō has often been equated with spiritual decline, actors within Shugendō in fact sought to transform the body of the ascetic from an uncanny spectacle into a manifestation of the divine, thereby constructing a new identity for its practitioners.

Facilitating pura medicina

In this article, based on my doctoral research, I discuss the appropriation of religious elements from South America by Finnish ‘mystical tourists’. The plant medicine ceremonies are approached as spiritual commodities. Imagining local beliefs and practices as ancient cultural heritage, essentially and authentically spiritual, Finnish mystical tourists adapt these practices for their own therapeutic uses. They are accompanied by singing prayers to various plant spirits. Among the appropriated elements are the ceremonial ingestion of imported organic cacao, sacred tobacco and ayahuasca, as well as praying by singing to plant spirits understood in terms of animism. My findings indicate how the appropriated cultural elements are given therapeutic functions in collectively created musical and ritual spaces for individual well-being. I analyse appropriation in categories introduced by Richard A. Rogers (2006) and understand the ceremonies to provide ‘mystical tourists’ with a role as a racially privileged group over the subaltern indigenous peoples through processes of commercialization, where reimagined cultural elements become spiritual commodities to be bought and sold in commercial networks on the basis of access. I argue that the associated forms of cultural appropriation align with the individualistic spiritual well-being needs of the Finnish participants and are related to the theme of ‘sacralization of the self’.

Ritualizing Politics and Politicizing Ritual: A Study of Kullu Dussehra

The study explores the modus operandi of the communities, kingship and modern nation-state in the spatial distribution of power in the ritual space. Kullu Dussehra is celebrated as a performative idiom of kingship, symbolically legitimizing royal or political power. It has consistently been appearing as a political phenomenon of burning Ravana’s effigy by the political leader. This symbolic role associates them with the pan-Indian imagination of ruler or lawmaker as the protector of dharma. In Kullu Dussehra, the share of power is spatially distributed, and the manifestation of royal power is celebrated and transmitted in public. The ritual space manifests the intersectionality of traditional notions of kingship and the modern nation-state. The paper tries to understand the power politics related to caste and social hierarchy in the Kullvi community. An overt caste-based ritual duty is highly practiced and expected to be celebrated by the community. However, there are multiple possibilities for the community to destabilize the ideological orientation of the hegemonic agencies.

História, futuro e desafios no contexto da cultura alimentar

ICAF promotes the edition of the journal Archives on Food, Culture and Nutrition (AFOCUN), which aligns the aims and history of the discipline, and which aims to be a meeting point to focus the contemporary debate around the food-culture relationship. The analysis of food and food processes is nowadays a fertile field for the analysis of culture. The journal thus aspires to situate the field of food as an epistemological metropolis in anthropology. Analysing these food processes in contemporary debates on the global or the local, the flows of people, migrations, tourism or other displacements, the relations between food and climate change, the processes of patrimonialisation, the tensions between identity and modernisation, virtual ethnographies on food, its presence in social situations of vulnerability such as the processes of health and illness or loneliness are combined in classical approaches of a symbolic or applied nature to delimit an enormous scenario of objects of interest for the journal. The relations between food and religious practices, the space of ritual or economic practices in the context of globalisation or work linked to development, to cite a small sample of contemporary reflection whose theoretical and epistemological debates may be developed in the following issues. In addition to a marked interest in the development of theory, the journal was born out of an interest in offering a space for the publication of texts of a markedly ethnographic nature. Among its sections, the journal will offer a space for reviews of works of interest for the Anthropology of Food.

Thinking through the tool: collaborative archaeological bodywork in immersive virtual reality

Thanks to currently available very high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) models via photogrammetric techniques as a primary method of archaeological documentation, constructing immersive, high-fidelity simulacra is imminently possible. This paper considers how the scale at which the human body interacts with immersive digital models is especially important for understanding the affordances and ergonomics of past things and places. The implications of this isometry between archaeological objects of analysis and emerging capabilities to interact with them through digital surrogates in the present are manifold. By enabling interaction with objects and contexts in immersive virtual space, such observational experiences create in silico engagements that are repeatable, distributable, and collaborative. In particular, it is the collaborative capacity of this technology that this paper explores using online immersive virtual reality (iVR). Collaborative online iVR is used in this research as a key instrument for enhancing understanding and reinterpreting the digital records of two archaeological sites under excavation in Peru. The case studies analyzed show a variety of cultural, geographic, and temporal contexts in the Andean region, which illustrates the broad potential of iVR for archaeological hermeneutics. Through iVR frameworks, the authors engage with embodied reconsiderations of Catholic ritual spaces within a planned colonial town in the southern Peruvian highlands and the pre-Columbian site of Huaca Colorada on the north coast. Synchronous scalar experiences that privilege the affordances of architectural space within digital models create opportunities for embodied experience and collaborative dialogue. A fundamental argument is the capacity to digitally inhabit these places and manipulate materials holds subtle as well as profound epistemological and hermeneutic implications for archaeological knowledge construction.

Alternative Forms and Approaches to Operatic Practice in Australia

This timely research presents an excerpt of my analysis of opera and operatic practice in Australia in 2021. The aim of the broader research is to interrogate the sustainability, viability and evolution of the Australian operatic field. Situated during the globally recognised Coronavirus pandemic era, this qualitative research project was conducted over the period 2018–2021. The fieldwork component of the research is an investigation conducted through long-form interviews with a selection of the central figures in the operatic field in Australia today. This excerpt is from Chapter 8, Part III Stories We Tell: Making and Staging Opera in Australia. I examine how and why repertoire opera is being reframed, and who is taking the lead in this reframing, juxtaposed with the personal and societal cost of performing unexamined extant opera works and perpetuating the ‘opera gaze’. The vision and division of the operatic field is deconstructed in an exploration of contemporary Australian opera and contemporary practices, fictional ritual spaces, and explorations of gender, Aboriginal opera and decolonising the postcolonial operatic lens.

Landed and Rooted: A Comparative Study of Traditional Hakka Dwellings (Tulous and Weilong Houses) Based on the Methodology of Space Syntax

Both Tulous (土楼) and Weilong Houses (围龙屋) are important types of traditional Hakka (客家) dwellings whose architectural morphology is closely related to the historical origin, social organisation, and cultural values of Hakkas. Previous studies focused on the influence of Chinese traditional etiquette systems and ritual values on the physical morphology of Hakka traditional dwellings, where ancestral halls are often the core of the entire building. This article selects six typical case studies of Tulous and Weilong Houses and launches a comparative study on their spatial configurations through quantitative analysis of space syntax. This study found that compared to Tulous, Weilong Houses exhibit decentralisation and gridification in their spatial structure, in addition to a decrease in defence capability and an increase in residential privatisation. The ancestral hall of the Tulou is still the spiritual and living centre of Tulou residents, located in the geometric centre and possessing high spatial configurational values. However, although the ancestral hall of the Weilong House is still located in the geometric centre of the entire building, it does not exhibit the highest spatial configurational values, indicating that the increase in secularisation and the decrease in ritualisation of Hakka communities inhabiting Weilong Houses resulted in the separation of secular space and ritual space. It coincides with the “Centre–Periphery” distribution characteristics of Hakka communities related to Tulous and Weilong Houses, reflecting the different community existence paradigms of the Hakkas “landed” and “rooted” in the Guangdong–Fujian–Jiangxi border area.