Axel Michaels's Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory, published by Oxford University Press, is a work of tremendous depth and scope that constitutes a major contribution to the field of ritual studies. Characterizing his approach as ethno-indological, Michaels combines aspects of textual analysis with three decades of fieldwork to situate Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu rituals in their cultural context. Michaels, through his process of combining his interest in ritual texts with his decades of work in Nepal and South Asia, clearly demonstrates his ability to proceed from analyzing individual performances to demonstrating the structural characteristics that unite all of these performances as ritual.Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu ritual, for Michaels, denotes not only a specific object of study but also an occasion to make a significant contribution to the field of ritual study more generally. Michaels challenges the all-too-familiar paradigm in academia that “theory” and “method” are the province solely of the Western academic to be imposed upon non-Western performance, instead proposing that Hindu rituals are culture-specific and cannot be fully separated from their religious and cultural contexts. Throughout Homo Ritualis Michaels sets himself the task of grounding the academic study of Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu ritual within both South Asia and within the ongoing diaspora of South Asian Hindu peoples throughout Western countries. Within this diaspora, Michaels contends, traditional ritual practices become attenuated as Hindu peoples find themselves in new Western communities. But even as traditional Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu rituals appear less frequently in Western industrialized countries, so too does it seem that new syncretic rituals have been created in these locations that fit neatly within the formula that Michaels argues underlies all Hindu rituals (312).Michaels argues that, at least when it comes to ritual practice in Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hinduism, what someone believes is of far less importance than what someone does—and this claim explains why it is that orthodox Hindu rituals continue to proliferate. Regardless of whether one is dealing with communication, work, eating, cleanliness, or sexuality, Michaels notes that one can find a ritual practice that offers important information about the individual and the individual's relation to these aspects of daily life. From this, Michaels is able to make a number of distinct claims about what a ritual is: it is a way of acting, it is structured by the principles of Brahmanic-Sanskritic sacrifice, which underlie this way of acting, and its structure is important to those ritual actors who wish to identify themselves as Hindu.Michaels structures ritual action such that it comprises four components: framing, formality, modality, and a transformation or confirmation of identity. The framing of the ritual creates the environment—temporal or spatial—in which a ritual occurs, insofar as it indicates a causal inducement and a ceremonial decision (or samkalpa), which is how one can tell the difference between an action performed in and of itself and an action performed as ritual. A ritual's formality governs the specific form a performance of the ritual takes, and has three elements: repetitiveness, publicity, and variability and performability. Modality designates the ritual as ritual rather than an everyday occurrence. In some ways, modality seems to refer to the performer of a ritual's intentions rather than a description of a concrete element that occurs within the performance, like those designating a ritual's formality. For Michaels, a ritual gains its modality from the way that the ritual action gains its individual, societal, or transcendent character, which distinguishes it from a nonritual performance. Finally, a ritual act, when completed, either indicates a transformation from one identity to another or confirms an identity bestowed upon the ritualist.Homo Ritualis is the work of a senior scholar in full command of his theoretical and explanatory powers, and this is reflected in the clarity of the monograph as well as its scope. Axel Michaels currently holds the position of Professor for Classical Indology at Heidelberg University, and his contributions to the fields of Nepali studies, Indian studies, ethno-Indology, and ritual studies are substantial, and have informed those discourses for more than three decades. Scholars interested in non-Western performance, Hindu theatre and performance, and Nepali or Indian cultural studies will find Michaels's book to be an essential addition to their personal libraries as well as their university's library. Homo Ritualis will be of most influence to scholars who work within the context of ritual studies specifically, or the performances of ritual more generally. And for scholars interested in Brahmanic-Sanskritic rituals, these rituals' proliferations throughout the world, and their incorporation of non-Hindu elements, Michaels's work is not merely useful—it is essential.What intrigues me most by Homo Ritualis is not necessarily what it achieves for our understanding of Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu rituals in performance and religious studies but how Michaels's insights into these rituals inform our understanding of ritual practice across a variety of cultural and historical contexts. Does Michaels's ethno-indological methodology yield similar results when applied to Shinto performances in Japan? Can what Michaels does for Brahmanic-Sanskritic Hindu rituals be replicated when applied to Yoruba rituals in Africa? Will syncretic performances in the Americas such as those found in the Caribbean benefit from this approach? There is no doubt in my mind that Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory is a work that scholars of religious studies will refer back to in the coming years—but its potential to influence scholars in adjacent discourses in theatre and performance studies is profound.