Ritual Space Research Articles

`So I Can Be Like a Whiteman': The Cultural Psychology of Space and Place in American Indian Mental Health

Careful analysis of a single ethnographic interview demonstrates that profound cultural divergences in Western professional and American Indian therapeutic traditions may well emanate from easily overlooked sources of ethnopsychological orientation and intelligibility, namely distinctive cultural psychologies of space and place. Interview responses from a middle-aged Native American Traditionalist on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation revealed that robust `mental health' was seen to result from participation in indigenous ritual spaces enacted or performed in designated sacred places on or near the reservation. In contrast, this respondent observed that consultation by community members with `White psychiatrists' in the local Indian Health Service clinic was an open invitation to `brainwash me forever so I can be like a Whiteman'. For those American Indians who share the respondent's cultural standpoint, reservation-based mental health clinics, despite their intentional designation as therapeutic spaces, may be seen to function as sites of colonial incursion and Native resistance in cultural—and especially ethnopsychological—terms. This article explores the implications of this distinctive cultural psychology of space and place with regard to the interdisciplinary investigation of therapeutic landscapes and the promise of `culturally competent' mental health services.

The Role of Small Islands in Marine Subsistence Strategies: Case Studies from the Caribbean

Caribbean archaeologists have tended to focus exclusively on the prehistory of the largest islands, perhaps because large islands are believed to provide the landmass necessary to support long-term population growth and cultural development. Yet, as research here and elsewhere, e.g., the Pacific, is showing, small islands provided access to resources and landscapes that were not always readily available on the larger islands. Small islands often have superior terrestrial and, especially, marine resources; isolated ritual spaces; and more easily defended locations; although they are susceptible to more rapid overexploitation. This paper examines in detail human needs with regard to island size, demonstrating that small islands were crucial in the development of pre-Columbian Caribbean societies. Four case studies are presented to illustrate that small islands often were preferred over large islands throughout the Caribbean archipelagoes. Finally, these studies show that the prehistoric exploitation and overexploitation of small islands can provide significant insights for establishing baselines that can be used for modern management and conservation efforts.

Meals and Mourning in Woolf's The Waves

Food and meals serve as vehicles through which Virginia Woolf considers being and its end, death, and the ritual encounters with death that are themselves heightened moments of consciousness. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf uses meals in The Waves as moments in the mourning process. The six characters in The Waves are confronted with the inevitability of mortality and the difficulties of mourning. They seek to come to terms with grief through ritual moments which bring them together. Meals provide such ritual moments, the ritual spaces, for instances of awareness and community. The taking of food signifies the potentiality of communion and consolation, even as it reminds each individual of the always-present possibility of her own ultimate dissolution, her own end of being.

Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation

This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit “men who have sex with other men” from donating blood. I argue that “passing” and “protest” are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both “passed” and “protested,” the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understanding stranger-relationality, enacting civic identity, and disciplining queer bodies.

The Dynamics of Ritual Space in the Hellenistic and Roman East*

Based on the archaeological data, the literary evidence, and the epigraphic sources, the article offers an overview of the strong interrelation between the dynamic changes in rituals and the subsequent architectural and structural adjustments of their space of performance. Violent interaction, social transformation, peaceful cross-cultural com­munication, the migration of new populations, the introduction of new cults, the mobility of ethnic and religious groups, ideological and political factors, and rivalry between cult places are some of the parameters that need to be taken into account, when studying the interdependence between ritual and space. Chronologically, the focus lies mainly on the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, but a few selected examples from the preceding periods shall complete the picture of this complex phenomenon.

Lexical reconstruction of Polynesian ritual space

Lexical reconstruction of Polynesian ritual space

Narrar o mundo: estórias do "povo da rua" e a narração do imprevisível

Enquanto narrativas podem ser pensadas como produtoras de "ordenamentos" e como manifestações simbólicas de formas ideológicas, por outro lado, podemos também enfatizar a dimensão poética da narrativa, apontando a produção de significados e a proliferação de signos mediados pelo ato de narrar o mundo. A partir desta perspectiva teórica, este ensaio busca explorar as muitas estórias sobre os chamados espíritos do "povo da rua", enfatizando a dimensão performativa da narrativa. Contadas por "clientes", "filhos-de-santo" e pelos próprios "espíritos", tais narrativas não são meramente simbólicas ou representativas, mas também constitutivas do próprio "poder sobrenatural" tido como inerente aos espíritos. Mais do que narrar uma "realidade" supostamente exterior a elas, as estórias tornam-se parte inextricável da "realidade" que narram. Ao deslocar o foco para além dos rituais demarcados espacial e temporalmente, a narrativa etnográfica busca aqui articular um espaço interpretativo onde se possa evocar a socialidade do narrar o mundo.

The Restructuring of Vietnamese Nationalism, 1954-2006

2000, the Vietnamese socialist state organized the first international festival in the former imperial capital of Hue in Central Vietnam. Six years later, at the fourth bi-annual festival, an elaborate and full procession to the imperial heaven-worship site {Nam Giao) from the former royal palace was recreated.2 In these four Hue festivals, the Vietnamese socialist state played an active role in the revitalization of the ritual space and symbolism of what it used to consider backward feudalism.3 In numerous other localities, with little direct involvement by the state, local festivities linked to once attacked ritual sites (shrines, temples, communal houses, pagodas) have also been recreated. While nationalism remains heightened in the mass media and many local events, the Vietnamese sociocultural landscape has undergone a fundamental transformation in the past two decades as Vietnam has become more and more integrated with the global capitalist system. This paper will examine the dynamics of the restructuring of Vietnamese discourses on culture and the nation at large over the past half a century. It is a process culminating in the Vietnamese socialist state's official embrace of a broader range of past practices as a part of Vietnamese cultural legacies and in its official discourse on the nation, culture and development.4 I would suggest that this shift is rooted at least as much in the dialogic relation between the Vietnamese socialist state and local populations, as in the stronger integration of Vietnam into the global capitalist system.5 The restructuring of Vietnamese nationalism is also examined partly in relation to the hypothesis

Things held in common: Memory, space and the reconstitution of community life

AbstractThis article presents the hard work, and eventual failure, of the elder branch of the main lineage within a village of steel producers to reaffirm local identity through the recreation of a common ritual space dedicated to the spirit of the village's founder, original artisan, and their ancestor. It presents this process as a struggle over the meanings and representations of community and space in a time of rapid social and economic transformation. The ultimate failure of this struggle, which only becomes evident after 15 years, has affirmed something else: the spaces of practice associated with the village's public administration and family-based commercial interests.

Holy ground: reinventing ritual space in modern western culture

Holy ground: reinventing ritual space in modern western culture

Active versus Passive Pluralism: A Changing Style of Civil Religion?

The reform of the United States Immigration Act in 1965 transformed what Robert Bellah identified as “American civil religion” and one of its central components: America's unique religious pluralism. At midcentury, Will Herberg showed how religion functions in the creation of American identity through what we call here “passive pluralism.” This passive pluralism allowed the mainline religions of America to claim a presence within the nation. But the new immigration patterns have created what the author calls here “active pluralism,” which lays assertive claim to the meanings of public time and space. This argument is explored through the construction of an Orthodox Jewish ritual space or eruv in Los Angeles.

Traces of Power: Recent Books on Women in Antiquity

Traces of Power:Recent Books on Women in Antiquity Laura McClure (bio) Philippe Borgeaud . Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary. Trans. Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xix + 186 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7985-X (cl). Susan Guettel Cole . Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv + 292 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-520-23544-4 (cl). Barbara Goff . Citizen Bacchae: Women's Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiii + 400 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-23998-9 (cl). Diane Kleiner . Cleopatra and Rome. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. 340 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-01905-9 (cl). These four ambitious books provide welcome new perspectives on the lives of ancient women, the spaces they inhabited, and the ways in which they influenced their societies. Although long a commonplace of classical scholarship that religion provided the primary access to power for ancient women, scant attention has been paid to the subject. All of these books address some aspect of gender and religion, from the ritual activities of women in ancient Greece, to the evolution of a maternal divinity in pagan religions and her translation to Christianity, and to the profound impact of a deified Egyptian queen on Roman culture. In Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space, Susan Guettel Cole explores the intersection of gender and ritual practice in ancient Greece, with close attention to the epigraphical evidence. Meticulously researched, the book weaves together a broad range of evidence, from inscriptions, literary and medical texts, to archaeological remains. What emerges is a complex picture of the organization of ritual space in ancient Greece and the ways it structured political communities. Cole begins by exploring three related and coextensive landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined. In Greece, the division of space always had political implications, and stories about the organization of space and the natural landscape were often "infused with gender." Early Greek epics, such as Hesiod's Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, contain [End Page 184] numerous geographical narratives that "locate the individual community in its landscape and connect it to mythic representations of the larger universe" (21). Such narratives also reflected human categories and social hierarchies: for instance, fixed locations, like the hearth, were associated in the Greek imagination with the female. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the ancient Greeks delimited the human from the divine. Injunctions against washing in a woman's bathwater, setting a boy on a grave, or eating from an unconsecrated pot, illustrate the profound need to separate human physical processes from the divine. Directed to an exclusively male audience, they also show the importance of delineating male from female. The inability to maintain these boundaries could infect the entire political community with pollution, thus requiring constant maintenance through the symbolic marking of perimeters and the repetition of ritual. In chapter 3, Cole considers the form and function of regional sanctuaries. These helped to merge autonomous cities—separated by geography and fiercely independent political structures—into a unified culture of shared traditions. The gods worshipped at these sites—Zeus at Olympia and Apollo at Delphi—promoted the universal recognition of divine laws. Apollo in particular was invested with a judicial authority that transcended political and territorial boundaries, supporting the "process by which cities made decisions and protected citizens from capricious leaders" (73). The fact that his sanctuary at Delphi marked the imaginary center of the world attests to the god's universality. Just as Delphi provided a sacred center that unified separate city-states into a culture of shared traditions and common laws, so, too, each city-state itself was organized around the prytaneion, "a space . . . both sacred and political" (80) that enclosed its common hearth and sacred fire and forged male solidarity and community. Chapter 4 elucidates the gender asymmetries entailed in ritual practice. Because the ancient Greeks worshipped in groups, gender often came into play in ritual contexts. Although it was less common for men and women to participate in shared rituals, there was no single formula for determining ritual constituency. Rituals connected with the body, especially...

"Christianization" and the Rural Home

The "Christianization" of the home is taken up here by examining the specific problem of Christian ritual and ritual spaces on the rural estate. It is argued that most worship in rural villas took place outside ecclesiastical supervision or intervention, and instead was shaped by older seigniorial hierarchies. It was this particular sociology of worship that brought domestic worship under episcopal scrutiny. The dissonance between seigniorial and ecclesiastical social structures might leave Christian estates outside episcopally-centered communities, suggesting that the "Christianization" of the rural home might be an ambiguous, fissiparous process rather than a seamless cultural transformation.

Analogy or Erasure? Dialectics of Religious Transformation in the Early Doctrinas of the Colca Valley, Peru

This paper examines the tension between the Spanish evangelical ideal of religious conversion (erasure and replacement of “idolatrous” praxis) and the exigencies of its enactment (inter-cultural communication via analogy) among a series of sixteenth century Franciscan doctrinal settlements (doctrinas) in the Colca valley of southern Peru. I suggest that the necessity and outcomes of inter-cultural communication during initial evangelization made conversion impossible, despite increasing institutionalization of coercive doctrinal measures through time. Combined archaeological and historical analysis explores how these tensions were locally negotiated. Written texts describe early extirpation campaigns, while archaeological evidence documents the remains of early doctrinas in the form of rustic chapels at local settlements which were previously centers of Inka power. Associations between these chapels and Inka ritual spaces hint at an analogical approach to conversion that is not as evident in the documentary record. Analogies linking Inka and Christian religious symbols were later “re-written” onto the surfaces and spaces of Spanish-style reducci´ on villages established in the 1570 s.

Local ideological strategies and the politics of ritual space in the Chimú Empire

This article examines the politics of ritual space in the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru after the conquest of the region by the Chimú Empire (A.D. 1200–1450). Interpretations are based on detailed analysis of ceremonial architecture located in the rural hinterland of urban centres. Despite imperial incorporation, the proliferation of ceremonial sites in the Jequetepeque countryside indicates that ritual production remained the prerogative of local groups. Architectural archaism, syncretism and the emulation of Chimú space in Jequetepeque demonstrate that rural communities adopted diverse ideological strategies to defend indigenous political identities and manipulate imperial authorities. The analysis improves understanding of the effects of Chimú conquest on local populations and suggests that imperial administration relied on indirect rule. Local communities were not passive consumers of state ideology but actively participated in the propagation of both corporate and indigenous religious systems. Ultimately, the article intends to advance archaeological interpretation of the political significance of patterned variability in the construction and experience of ceremonial space.

6. Settlement patterns-Social and ritual space in prehistoric Samoa

Abstract This paper explores the extensive prehistoric settlement pattern at the Letolo plantation. Using the results of earlier research we use a correspondence analysis to investigate variation in the settlement pattern, particularly differences between coastal and inland locations. Investigation of archaeological sites in Samoa in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in several suggestions about the prehistoric settlement pattern (Davidson 1969, Davidson 1974:242; Jennings et al. 1982). The first archaeological excavations investigated a variety of sites, and an important conclusion of this research was that prehistoric settlement was established at both coastal and inland locales in early prehistory (at least by c. 2000 BP). It was also found that house pavements were an early component of the settlement sequence, but raised stone and earth platforms/mounds for occupation or ritual space are, to current knowledge, confined to the last millennium (Wallin, Martinsson-Wallin and Clark, this publication). A temporal shift in material culture in Samoa is thereby evident. Roads and stone walls were frequently associated with large platforms/mounds. The roads were often clearly defined by stone walls and connected house hold units. Settlement pattern studies Jennings et al. (1982) based their discussion of Samoan prehistoric settlement patterns on data from ethnohistorical records, extensive archaeological survey data and excavations, which they compared with the layout of the contemporary village of Fa'a'ala on Savai'i. The results of the Letolo archaeological survey were employed to interpret the prehistoric settlement pattern, but other settlements at Mt Olo on Upolu, and the Sapapali'i settlements on Savai'i were also brought into the discussion. Using the ethnohistoric settlement data as a backdrop, Jennings et al. (1982) concluded that prehistoric settlements consisted of a household unit (HHU) made up of a few individual house platforms, with a cooking area separated from the other units by walls or walkways (more than 75% were enclosed by walls), and a possible garden area within the enclosure (Jennings et al. 1982:82). Several HHU grouped around a chief's dwelling unit, which was identified by a larger platform. Collectively these chiefly clusters constituted a unit called pito nu'u (residential wards). Several pito nu'u clusters constituted a larger unit called nu'u (village) with a mala'e (village green) and a fale tele (community house). Larger platforms were identified as a chief's dwelling or a community meeting house, and through the use of statistical methods the Letolo settlement pattern was divided in to five village wards (pito nu'u) by Jennings et al. (1982:84) (Figure 1). Roger Green subsequently put forward a sequence in which the settlement pattern has various phases, but there is strong cultural continuity evident throughout the prehistoric sequence (Green 2002:135-146): 1. Settlement patterns during the period of the decorated Lapita ceramics (c. 2900-2700 BP) 2. Settlement patterns during the period of Polynesian plainware (c.2700-2000/1500? BP) 3. An interval for which settlement pattern evidence is extremely limited (c. 1500-1000 BP) 4. Settlement patterns between 1000 and 200 years ago (c. 1000-200 BP). The earliest archaeological evidence for the settlement pattern came from a house site with Polynesian plainware at Sasoa'a which was dated to c. 1800 BP (Green 2002:138139). The house comprised a principal dwelling (PPN *fale) with its posts (PPN *pou, tulu), and other features including an earth oven (PPN *umu), stone pavement (PPN *paepae), storage pit (PPN *lua) and boundary fence (PPN *lotuqaa). The house layout and features were seen by Green as similar to those of the later household units (HHU), suggesting that there was continuity in the social formations expressed in the Samoan settlement pattern. Green also suggests that Ancestral Polynesian societies were house societies and HHU were tied to a social group (PPN * kainga) 'aiga probably lead by a family elder (PPN * fatu). …

Making mountains out of molehills in the Bronze Age Aegean: visibility, ritual kits, and the idea of a peak sanctuary

Cretan peak sanctuaries have long attracted interest for their topographical characteristics, and several studies have emphasized the inter-visibility of groups of peak sanctuaries, and their location within sight of settlements and upland pastures. By contrast, it is argued here that, while the prominence of peak sanctuaries within the landscape clearly contributed to their wide and rapid spread as a type of ritual space, the location on a mountain peak may have been secondary to the cult objects and equipment used in structuring and transmitting the ritual practices that took place there. Using polythetic classification to determine the basic range of artefacts that constitutes a peak sanctuary-like assemblage, several non-mountain locations are identified at which ‘peak sanctuary’ rituals appear to have taken place, indicating that the idea of a peak sanctuary was locally adaptable and that visibility and landscape location were perhaps less important to peak sanctuary cult than traditionally supposed.

Aree aperte e concezione dello spazio a Roma

This essay explores the ritual dimension of public space in ancient Rome. It acknowledges that the organisation of space in general is a mental perception that can only be understood if contextualized in its specific historic setting. In the case of ancient Rome, ritual constitutes an obligatory starting point for such a contextual analysis; from ancient times onwards the city of Rome was collectively conceptualized as a ritual space, with the augurs playing a central role in its interpretation. From this perspective, the aim of the author is to explain why public space in imperial Rome is rarely open, being most often encapsulated within monumental porticoes and other kind of enclosures. The central argument reasons that these spaces were rigorously functional in nature (political-administrative, economic or commercial), and, therefore, needed to be sacralised and religiously delineated.

Migration and vodou

This book and accompanying compact disc provide a rare insight in the innovative ways a community of Haitian migrants in South Florida has maintained religious traditions and familial connections. It demonstrates how religion, ritual, and cultural practices affect lives on both sides of the Caribbean, and it debunks myths of exotic and primitive vodou (often spelled voo doo), which have long been used against Haitians. As Karen Richman shows, Haitians at home and in migrant settlements make ingenious use of audio and video tapes to extend the boundaries of their ritual spaces and to reinforce the moral and spiritual anchors to one another. The book and CD were produced in collaboration to give the reader intimate access to this new expressive media. Sacred songs are recorded on tapes and circulated among the communities. Migrants are able to hear not only the performance sounds - drumming, singing, and chatter - but also a description, as narrators tell of offerings, sacrifices, prayers, and the exchange of possessions. Spirits who inhabit the bodies of ritual actors are aware of the recording devices and personally address the absent migrants, sometimes warning them of their financial obligations to family members in Haiti. The migrants' dependence on their home village is dramatically reinforced while their economic independence is restricted. Using standard ethnographic methods, Richman's work illuminates the connections among social organization, power, production, ritual, and aesthetics. With its transnational perspective, it shows how labor migration has become one of Haiti's chief economic exports.

What Is The Pride Of Halicarnassus?

Abstract This paper proposes a general analysis of the structure and imagery of the Salmacis epigram, a late Hellenistic verse inscription recently found in Bodrum which relates the foundation of Halicarnassus and lists the achievements of the city's authors. Focusing on the first part of the poem, I argue that the epigram can be seen to trace a complex symbolic map of the city in space and time. On a first level of reference the poem's episodes of foundation are consistently represented as the aitia of ritual events. Superimposed on the catalogue of foundation episodes is a catalogue of the ritual events that commemorated them, and our epigram uses this level of reference to ground its portrait of Halicarnassus in the contemporary ritual life of the polis. In this way the poem is able to locate the city in the space of cult and to inscribe the linear time of primordial origins in the recurrent present of ritual practice. On a complementary level of reference, finally, the different episodes of foundation also function as so many statements of kinship—every founder effectively ties the city to another region and another people. As a parallel to the local space of ritual, then, the combination of these statements of kinship is made to locate the city in the wider space of ethnic geography. Behind a seemingly simple catalogic form, the Salmacis epigram actually combines two levels of reference to achieve a significant and multifaceted representation of a late Hellenistic city's cultural memory.