Understanding Of Ritual Research Articles

Local Lordship and Joyous Entries in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands

Ever since the cultural turn and the understanding of ritual and ceremony as forms of communication and symbolic negotiation, medieval and early modern princely coronations, inaugurations, and joyous entries have received incessant scholarly attention. That was much less the case for seigneurial joyous entries that took place in villages and small towns. The Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, and the Duchy of Brabant in particular, had a remarkably strong tradition in this respect. Local lords and ladies held entries in their seigneuries, issued liberty charters, and swore to uphold local rights and privileges. These entries gave occasion to high masses and Te Deums, banquets with local dignitaries, and festivities for the other inhabitants. This article analyses a set of 88 seigneurial entries, ranging from the early fifteenth until the late eighteenth century. It argues that these solemnities were structural components of the seigneurial landscape, carrying legal, social, and political meaning. They are also gauges for the power relations between the lord or lady, local office holders, and villagers or townspeople at a given moment, and can therefore help us to better understand who stood to gain most from the seigneurial system.

The Effects of Daily Ritual Behaviors at Work on Daily Flow Experience and Task Performance

Although the benefits of performing ritual behaviors have been recognized in various fields, it remains unclear whether, why, and when employees can promote their daily task performance via engaging in ritual behaviors at work. To fill these theoretical gaps, we conducted two studies to develop a new scale to measure employees’ enactment of ritual behaviors at work and test the psychological processes linking daily ritual behaviors at work and task performance and the boundary condition of this association. In Study 1, we first collected the critical incidents from 151 full-time employees to develop a new measure of ritual behaviors at work. Then we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to examine the validity of our new measure using the second sample (total N = 646). In Study 2, we tested our theoretical model by employing the experience sampling method and collected daily data twice from 195 employees across five consecutive workdays, resulting in 912 matched daily responses. Consistent with the bottom-up and top-down processing of rituals and self-determination theory, the results indicated that daily ritual behaviors at work increase daily flow experience, enhancing subsequent task performance. Importantly, employees’ job autonomy can further amplify the positive effect of daily ritual behaviors on daily flow experience. Future researchers can use our measure to capture employees’ ritual behaviors at work and test its effects on other work-related outcomes to expand our understanding of rituals at work.

On Wittgenstein’s Notion of a Surveyable Representation: Rituals, Aesthetics, and Aspect-Perception

ABSTRACT I demonstrate that analogies, both explicit and implicit, between Wittgenstein’s discussions of rituals, aesthetics, and aspect-perception have important payoffs in terms of understanding his notion of a ‘surveyable representation’ (übersichtliche Darstellung) as it applies to phenomena that are not exclusively grammatical in nature. In particular, I argue that a surveyable representation of various anthropological and aesthetic facts allows us to see, qua form of aspect-perception, internal relations and formal connections, so that the inner nature of a ritual or the solution of an aesthetic puzzle is exhibited. This particular form of seeing both explains why Wittgenstein thought that hypothetical explanations about the origins of a ritual are irrelevant to appreciating its meaning and elucidates his understanding of rituals, which involves seeing ‘internal relations’ and ‘formal connections’. The upshots of the account for work in anthropology are discussed.

Ritual and Self-Cultivation in the Daoist Practice of “Oblatory Refinement”

AbstractThis article describes a Daoist salvific ritual called jilian 祭鍊, “oblatory refinement,” as presented within a ritual manual written by Zheng Sixiao 鄭思肖 (1241–1318). Zheng’s formulation of this ritual and his extensive commentary on its individual elements show that he regards this ritual not only as a means of achieving salvation for others, but also as a complete system of self-cultivation that is capable of enabling the practitioner’s self-apotheosis. After discussing the historical background of the ritual and describing its various stages, I analyze Zheng’s approach to ritual practice and his understanding of the relationship between ritual and self-cultivation, both of which are characterized by his emphasis on the quality of “sincerity” (cheng 誠). Ultimately, I argue that the Daoist notion of an “inner,” cognitive and affective dimension of ritual practice points to useful ways of supplementing contemporary theoretical understandings of ritual that focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the formal aspects and social contexts of ritual activities.

Liturgical Rituals as Shared Intentional Practices

In my paper I argue that liturgical rituals presuppose shared intentions, beliefs and goals on behalf of the participants. Even if there are different roles in liturgy (priests, deacons, ‘normal’ believers), there is no intentional asymmetry between ‘performers’ and ‘followers’. My account of liturgical rituals as shared activities of participants with shared intentions, beliefs and goals requires a modification of Gärdenfors’ understanding of rituals as tools of learning.

Alike but different: the understanding of rituals among Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Denmark

ABSTRACTThis article will discuss the meaning(s) of rituals among Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus in Denmark with special focus on the second generation. It will use Roy A. Rappaport's theory on ritual both as communication and as a basic social act, but it will also, in line with Jan Assmann and Hervieu Legér, understand the ritual as a storing place of collective memory. It will give a short outline of what can be called the institutionalisation but also the placemaking of the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu tradition in Denmark, but the empirical focus will be on the chariot procession (Tēr), which attracts thousands of participants every year. The Tēr procession is an example of continuity and change. Continuity because the participants try to reproduce the ritual as they know it from Sri Lanka, however, changed so it fits into or communicates with the new setting.

René Girard a jeho mimetická teorie společnosti jako možné východisko k nové sociologické teorii

The presented article introduces René Girard’s thought, especially the main components of his mimetic theory of culture. The author identifies in Girard’s work two main lines of thought: firstly, the part which covers the psychosocial effects of mimetism on the micro-social level; secondly, the part which deals with the effects of mimetism on the macro-social level and with the impact it has on the genesis and preservation of social structure. The author further explicates Girard’s understanding of ritual, myth, the sacred victim, the sacred monarchy and the relation between religion and society in general. The final part of the article considers the potential inspiration and relevance of Girard’s work for sociological theory. The author argues that the primary task is now to examine the relation of Girard’s thought to Durkheim’s theory of society. He further suggests to take a new look (with the help of Girard’s work) at the old theoretical dispute between Émile Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde, and examine, to bridge the differences between Durkheim and Tarde. The author considers such step especially relevant since Girard’s thought is grounded in the Durkheimian tradition and – at the same time – Girard’s key concept of mimesis plays central role in Tarde’s sociology. This is the direction towards which the author intends to work further in his own research.

The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, the current paper provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Our framework focuses on three primary regulatory functions of rituals: regulation of (1) social connection, (2) emotions, and (3) performance goal states. We examine the possible mechanisms underlying each function by considering the bottom-up processes that emerge from the physical features of rituals and top-down processes that emerge from the psychological meaning of rituals. Our framework, by appreciating the value of psychological theory, generates novel predictions and enriches our understanding of ritual and human behavior more broadly.

The Ambivalence of Denial: Danger and Appeal of Rituals eds. by Ute Hüsken and Udo Simon

Reviewed by: The Ambivalence of Denial: Danger and Appeal of Rituals eds. by Ute Hüsken and Udo Simon Michael D. K. Ing (bio) Ute Hüsken and Udo Simon, editors. The Ambivalence of Denial: Danger and Appeal of Rituals. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016. 315 pp. Hardcover $52.00, isbn 978-3-447-10570-5. Ute Hüsken and Udo Simon are two of the most innovative thinkers in the field of ritual studies. This volume builds on a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Ritual Studies on the topic of "denial" (itself the result of a 2009 panel at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference). It includes 10 chapters, each written by a different contributor, an introduction by Hüsken and Simon, and an afterword by Ian Reader (a scholar of Japanese religion). Just over half the essays are about Hinduism (broadly construed), two essays are on Islam, one essay is on Zen Buddhism, and one essay is on Chinese burial customs in the Eastern Han. Despite only one article about China, readers of China Review International, particularly those with an interest in ritual, will find this volume worthwhile. Ritual in a Chinese context is a growing interest among scholars of China, and the health of the sub-field in part depends on engagement beyond a single cultural context. In this light, The Ambivalence of Denial is fruitful in several ways. The volume is essentially structured around the question of how analyzing "denials" in ritual performance adds to our understanding of ritual as a cross-cultural field of study. While each contributor views denial differently, they all build their cases on the assumption that a general category of ritual can be constructed, with specific cultural particularities. In this sense, ritual is a "universal mode of human action" (p. 7) and is subject to common human tendencies of evaluation and criticism. Hüsken and Simon explain, "Humans always seem to need ritual, but they also always seem to reject ritual" (p. 7). [End Page 264] The contributors set out to explore these competing impulses. The notion of ambivalence also plays an important role, as the contributors seek to unpack the ways in which denial is at the same time permissive and impermissive—serving to endorse certain practices while disqualifying others. Denial, in short, is multi-dimensional, it can exclude particular people or practices, reaffirm the validity of certain actions or actors, and also invent new modes of action to replace those being denied (p. 307). The Ambivalence of Denial works in tandem with other scholarship in the field of ritual studies such as Ronald Grimes' work on "criticism" and ritual.1 Hüsken, in particular, has been influential in examining what might be called the negative aspects of ritual—editing a volume on ritual and "failure" and more recently co-editing a volume on ritual and "negotiation."2 Readers interested in The Ambivalence of Denial will also want to consult these other volumes. Rather than providing summaries of each article in The Ambivalence of Denial, which can be found in the introduction to the volume, I will instead show how the authors' framing of ritual and denial might be fruitful in thinking about ritual in a Chinese context. My hope is that this will encourage more engagement with this kind of scholarship, which will in turn attract the attention of those not studying China to our scholarship about China. Kongzi (Confucius) is a prominent figure in many early Chinese texts. He is often depicted interacting with his disciples. In texts concerned with ritual, Kongzi's interactions are occasionally correctives to his disciples' flawed performance of ritual. A major theme in these vignettes is the ways in which ritual practices serve to "order sentiment" 治情 in contrast to the ways in which Kongzi's disciples tend to allow their sentiments to be excessive.3 For instance, the "Tangong Shang" 〈檀弓上i chapter in the Liji 《禮記》 relates the following interaction: Zilu wore the mourning clothing worn for mourning one's sister. He could have removed it [because the requisite time had passed], but did not remove it. Kongzi asked, "Why don't you remove [the mourning clothing]?" 子路有姊之喪' 可以除之矣' 而弗除也' 孔子曰:「何弗除也?」 Zilu replied, "I have...

Organizational Rituals, Communication, and the Question of Agency

This study explores the performative aspects of organizational rituals to explain their agentic capacity and understand how rituals participate in the accomplishment of organizational action. We develop an alternative framework of organizational rituals based on insights from communication theory and the literature on the communicative constitution of organization/ing (CCO) and demonstrate how rituals “make present” abstract representations of organizational power and value in ways that convey authority and bear down upon the activities and decisions of organizational members. This can be understood through a logic of “attribution and appropriation” that both constitutes rituals as actants and enables them to possess the actions of their participants. This represents a departure from previous research on organizational rituals but can also enhance our understanding of rituals, agency, and symbolic action in organizations—especially in terms of exploring sources of action and agency beyond human intentionality.

Pilgrimage as Trope for an Anthropology of Christianity

While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in forming the emergent anthropology of Christianity, research on pilgrimage has had far less of an effect on this subfield. I explore some of the reasons why by looking at the “semiotics of theory” and asking what constitutes resonant anthropological model making at a particular moment in the construction of anthropology. Having provided a critical account of past theoretical and ethnographic work on Christian pilgrimage, I suggest an alternative approach, drawing in part on fieldwork carried out at the pilgrimage shrines of Walsingham, in Norfolk, England. I suggest that my approach can provide useful perspectives not only on the anthropology of Christianity but also on aspects of our understanding of ritual and religious experience more generally.

Cinematic “Pas de Deux”: The Dialogue between Maya Deren's Experimental Filmmaking and Talley Beatty's Black Ballet Dancer in A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.

Umgidi at the Mabambas': Gender, Practice and Performance Among Farm Workers in the Sundays River Valley

This article describes and analyses an umgidi, a celebratory feast that usually accompanies the final ‘coming out’ phase of circumcision, among farm workers in the Sundays River Valley, Eastern Cape. Anthropological monographs describing circumcision rituals among Xhosa-speakers appear not to discuss such a feast at all, despite this event being familiar to most rural and urban Xhosa-speakers, particularly in the western half of the Eastern Cape. In the absence of comparative information, this article introduces an umgidi feast as a multi-vocal event that comments on the spatial, performative and practice-oriented elements of life among workers in the Sundays River Valley. I show that farm workers have a definite sense of identity and place connected to the occupation of land as labour tenants and later as labourers. Their conservative rural values are closely associated with the memories of previous land occupation, but are also combined with experiences of displacement, so that memories of lost land directly inform the creation of current identities. An umgidi feast allows the unification of fragmented groups of kin and clan, and provides an opportunity for workers to articulate the pressures of modern farm employment. The prominence of female workers at umgidi feasts also heightens the use of domestic space as an idiom for commentary on experiences of disruption and labour domination. Broadly, the article contributes to an understanding of ritual among displaced communities in southern Africa, particularly labour tenants and farm workers on white farms.

Ritual and sincerity

In this article, I develop an understanding of ritual and of sincerity as two ideal-typical modes of framing human action. I focus on the dangers of what I term the sincere model because it is so strongly counter-intuitive to the way we usually understand the world, the moral imperatives of action and the framing of our intersubjective universe. I will begin, however, with some brief remarks on ritual — not as a discrete realm of human endeavor, usually identified with ‘religious’ ritual (though inclusive of religious ritual), but rather as a particular modality of understanding action that is essential to the constitution of both social and individual selves and without which a shared world would not be possible.

Robert Hertz’s seminal essay and mortuary rites in the Pacific region

This special issue emerged from a session, entitled ‘Spiritual material: Objects and change in mortuary ritual,’ that Pierre Lemonnier and I organized at the conference of the European Society for Oceanists (ESfO) in Marseille in June 2005. In this session we explored the link between the spiritual and the material in mortuary ritual in the Pacific region. Inspired by the French anthropologist Robert Hertz (18811915), who in his 1907 essay on secondary funerals demonstrated a correspondence between the decay of the corpse and the fate of the soul, we focused on artifacts other than the human body. We returned to the basic tenet of his theory that ‘‘to make a material object or living being pass from this world to the next, to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed. [...] As the visible object vanishes it is reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or lesser degree’’ (Hertz, 1960: 46). There are cases in which the deceased’s intimate possessions are destroyed, but also instances in which objects of the dead are kept as relics or heirlooms. Why? In line with Hertz’s argument we might make a distinction here between flesh-type and bonetype of objects. The latter seem to mediate the relationship between the living and the dead. They remain intact like the corpse’s dry bones. The other objects, being destroyed, resemble the vanishing flesh, seemingly considered one with the imagery of the physical body or inseparable from the deceased in one way or another. The connection between the spiritual (as expressed in verbal formulations or otherwise) and the material was further examined by looking at change in mortuary ritual: do changes in people’s notions of an otherworldly spiritual existence coincide with changes in the material aspects of mortuary ritual? And finally, why is it that people tend to adhere most strongly to their mortuary rituals, while paradoxically at an early stage introduced goods often become items of mortuary exchange? Throughout the session there were lively discussions that showed the actuality of Hertz’s insights. A vivid demonstration of a bone-type of object was given at the end of the conference when a Tikopian fish-hook ornament associated with Sir Raymond Firth was handed down to Maurice Godelier, who in turn contemplated about the passing on of this heirloom of the anthropological tribe. Here, however, we consider Hertz’s 1907 essay an ‘‘enigmatic gift,’’ still valuable in the twenty-first century. The issue commemorates the centennial of the publication of Hertz’s seminal essay ‘Contribution a une Etude sur la Representation Collective de la Mort.’ The essay first appeared in L’Annee sociologique (vol. 10, pp. 48-137) in 1907. Translated into English by Rodney and Claudia Needham ¢ and entitled ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,’ it came out together with another essay in the book Death and the Right Hand in 1960. In the same year Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book Les Rites de Passage was published in an English translation. Both works would have an impact on the understanding of ritual in the Englishspeaking world. Hertz’s essay already contained the idea of rites of passage, and Hertz thus pre-

When I was a child: children's interpretations of First Communion

Listening to children's understandings of a ritual First Communion is generally understood as a rite of passage in which seven- and eight-year-old Catholic children transform from baptized participants in the Church to members of the body of Christ, the universal Catholic Church. This official Church account, however, ignores what the rite actually may mean to its participants. In When I Was a Child, Susan Ridgely Bales demonstrates that the accepted understanding of a religious ritual can shift dramatically when one considers the often neglected perspective of child participants. Bales followed Faith Formation classes and interviewed communicants, parents, and priests in an African American parish and in a parish containing both white and Latino congregations. By letting the children speak for themselves through their words, drawings, and actions, When I Was a Child stresses the importance of rehearsal, the centrality of sensory experiences, and the impact of expectations in the communicants' interpretations of the Eucharist. In the first sustained ethnographic study of how children interpret and help shape their own faith, Bales finds that children's perspectives give new contours to the traditional understanding of a common religious ritual. Ultimately, she argues, scholars of religion should consider age as distinct a factor as race, class, and gender in their analyses.

Cultural Landscapes in the Ancient Andes: Archaeologies of Place (review)

MOORE, IERRY D. Cultural Landscapes in the Ancient Andes: Archaeologies of Place. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2005. 304 pages.As the subtitle indicates, Jerry Moore's book is about archaeologies of place, but the problems he deals with are not limited to the specifically identifiable places that most often concern archaeologists. As an archaeologist, Moore's primary objects of analyses are the material objects and places of ancient Andean societies, but he argues that they must be understood in the context of social space. Of course, this is not new to archaeology: the goal of all archaeological analysis ultimately is to attempt to understand other cultures. Moore argues, however, that the only way to do so is through an anthropological holism that takes into consideration the various domains implicated in the architecture and the built environment of ancient societies. Moore explains that traditional archaeological research, including his own, has not sufficiently developed this anthropological holism, and the tour central chapters of his book develop lines of analysis that have been neglected in Andean archaeology.Following the introduction, the second chapter attempts to demonstrate how the consideration of sound can be incorporated into archaeological analysis. In order to demonstrate the significance of sound, Moore argues that the relationship between proximity of sound-permeable dwellings correlates to degrees of social cohesion: communities of closely situated huts where conversations were easily overheard reflect a high degree of social cohesion, while the dispersion of huts over greater distances indicates the presence of social tension. Moore recognizes that there are other possible reasons why huts might be dispersed, but in general his data seem to support the correlation between degrees of proximity and degrees of social cohesion.The third chapter argues that types of ceremonial architecture correspond to varying social conceptions of religious (118). Moore hypothesizes that permanent, large-scale, public architecture is not consistent with religious authority based on shamanic practices but rather indicates either a religious authority based on the mastery of a canon of knowledge or some other kind of political authority. The premise of this argument is that different conceptions of power and authority employ distinct modes of practice and are therefore materially expressed in distinct (120). In support, Moore presents ethnographic evidence from a number of contemporary South American societies that corroborates his hypothesis.The fourth chapter draws on ritual theory to explore the ways in which an understanding of ritual may inform archaeological analysis and vice versa. Moore explains that the design logic of types of architecture corresponds to types of ritual practices. …

Becoming a Christian in Fiji: an ethnographic study of ontogeny

By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke girls and boys between 7 years, 10 months and 13 years old. The broader objective is to demonstrate, first, how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and, secondly, how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it.

Becoming a Christian in Fiji: an ethnographic study of ontogeny

By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke girls and boys between 7 years, 10 months and 13 years old. The broader objective is to demonstrate, first, how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and, secondly, how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it.

When Fibre Meets Fibre

When Fibre Meets Fibre