Women's Rituals Research Articles

Women in the Regia and the Republican Imagination

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between gender and space through a consideration of women's ritual performances in the Regia, an ancient and sacred building at the edge of the Roman Forum. In this space, the regina sacrorum , the flaminica Dialis , the saliae virgines , and the Vestal Virgins performed a range of public rituals on behalf the Roman people. The paper examines how the material setting of the Regia and traditions associating it with the regal period shaped the experiences of the priestesses as they carried out their ritual obligations. It also considers how their ritual performances contributed to the perception that the Regia and many of the city's most important rituals were rooted in the regal period.

The book of women's rituals: the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ

AbstractThis article explores the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ which has survived as a single copy within a manuscript codex located at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Not only does the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ lift ‘the iron curtain’ from the little-known world of rituals and customs practised by women in early modern Central Asian societies, it also serves as an important source to balance the androcentric view of gendered history of the early modern Persianate world, while challenging the preconceived notions of women's agency and authority in pre-modern Muslim societies.

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

Guardians of the Buddha's Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū by Jessica Starling

Reviewed by: Guardians of the Buddha's Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū by Jessica Starling Eisho Nasu (bio) Guardians of the Buddha's Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū. By Jessica Starling. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2019. xii, 186 pages. $62.00, cloth; $28.00, paper. Jessica Starling's Guardians of the Buddha's Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū is a welcome addition to the small but growing literature on domestic spheres in contemporary Japanese Buddhism. The "guardians" who are the subject of Starling's study are the bōmori (temple guardians), the wives of priests of the Jōdo Shinshū tradition, one of the [End Page 136] largest forms of "domestic" Buddhism in Japan. The founder of this tradition, Shinran (1173–1262), consciously rejected monastic norms and chose marriage and family as the basis of his Buddhist practice. Using her extensive ethnographic research, Starling skillfully and conscientiously presents her informants' voices so that readers can reimagine and reevaluate the stereotypical image of Buddhist traditions dominated so far by the collective voices of male priests. Starling's work stands out for its focus on mainly nonordained, nonmonastic women. Much of the literature on women in Buddhism has justifiably centered on the lives of Buddhist nuns (whether ordained or not). Starling's study of temple wives instead opens the door to the Buddhist home, an area still underrepresented in the field of Japanese Buddhism (with Paula Arai's Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals being another excellent example of studies of domestic Buddhism1). While the women Starling introduces are not nuns and ordination is not required (although increasingly bōmori are obtaining ordination), they are nevertheless "domestic religious professionals" who live in temples, which perhaps still differentiates them from other laywomen. As temple wives married to temple priests/husbands, their work is defined in part by traditional gender roles and expectations. But, ironically, it is these expectations, Starling asserts, that make the temple wife into a professional: "One of the surprising discoveries of my fieldwork was that the very gender ideology that divides labor along gender lines and 'confines' women to staying at home in fact renders temple wives de facto religious professionals" (p. 16). That is, bōmori work to propagate Buddhism from within the home, for example by welcoming people into the temple with hospitality that will foster connections with the temple and Amida (pp. 44–46); furthermore, whenever the priest/husband is away from the home (or dies), the wife becomes the de facto priest, conducting rituals and services (chapter 5). Starling's work explores how women navigate these various roles, their attitudes toward their work, and the problems they face within institutions and society that still tend to devalue women's contributions to traditionally male work. In the "Introduction," Starling is careful to set out the limits of her position as a Western scholar studying Asian subjects. She draws on works by Wei-Yi Cheng and Nirmala Salgado that have pointed out the tendency of Western scholars to apply their own feminist ideas and expectations to Asian Buddhist women,2 thereby (consciously or unconsciously) making [End Page 137] a discourse of Asian women's self-empowerment, agency, resistance, and freedom that Asian women themselves may not recognize. To avoid mischaracterization, Starling tries to "enter into the everyday lives of her informants with an honest sense of humility in order to discover the categories and concepts that operate for them on a practical level" (p. 7). Overall, this is a strength of Starling's work (although I have one criticism; see below), and she listens to the actual voices of the women (and men) she interviews. She seeks to understand their lives broadly through the "intimacy and intersubjectivity" that is at the core of their many family and community relationships and that gives them relational agency (p. 11). Readers find an alternative vision of contemporary Japanese Buddhist practice in the context of domestic life, in which temple wives cultivate skills of interpersonal communication rather than scripted doctrine. Starling constructs all six chapters around her interviews with 60 women from temple families, which...

A Probe into the Renaissance of Confucianism in Song Dynasty and Women's Politeness

The revival of Confucianism in the Song Dynasty is of great significance to the development of the Confucian school.Based on the development of Confucianism and systematic research, it can be found that the Song Dynasty is an important period of Confucianism revival, and also a period that cannot be ignored in the study of Confucianism. In general, the Confucian renaissance in the Song Dynasty was caused by many reasons, and under the background of the Confucian renaissance, Taoism and Buddhism have developed significantly, which has caused a large number of female rituals in the society.Analysing and studying the Confucian renaissance in Song Dynasty and the phenomenon of women's rites and buddhas are significant for understanding the cultural environment of Song Dynasty and understanding social life in Song Dynasty.The article makes a concrete analysis of the Confucian renaissance in Song Dynasty and the phenomenon of women's ritual Buddha, aiming to clarify the specific reasons of Confucian renaissance and the cause and influence of women's ritual Buddha.

“You can glorify your daughter in her song”: Exploring Musical Narratives of Gassuus Initiates

Gassuus is a Jola women's ritual that prepares girls and young women for their futures as mothers while reinforcing women's vital roles as community leaders. In this article, Rosner examines the ways Jola women from one community in Thionck Essyl, Senegal, establish and strengthen gendered relationships through musical narratives. Songs from the gassuus ritual are performative sites for expressing Jola women's worldviews and collective identity, as girls are prepared for the responsibilities of motherhood. Decades later, women still remember the songs written by the women who shaped their lives, and they recall this period as a time when they began to define themselves and their futures.

Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature by Vassiliki Panoussi

Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature by Vassiliki Panoussi

Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature by Vassiliki Panoussi

Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature by Vassiliki Panoussi

Introduction

Introduction

"At Amen meals it's me and God" - Religion and gender: A new Jewish women's ritual.

"At Amen meals it's me and God" - Religion and gender: A new Jewish women's ritual.

"The Daughters of Israel": An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources

This article recovers history of term the of Israel (b'not yisrael) from its earliest usage in biblical passages and second temple sources to its appearance in late antique Jewish texts, focusing specifically on term's connotations in rabbinic sources and ritual texts. Rather than taking term at face-value as denoting women's subordinate status, we argue that this term may have a buried history, and that uncovering history of term daughters of Israel offers a fascinating entry-point into role of women in establishing and transforming—rather than merely observing—Jewish law and ritual. Extending Mieke Bal's notion of feminist philology to investigation of rabbinic and other late antique Jewish sources, we make case that in rabbinic literature from late antiquity, Hebrew term daughters of Israel appears in sites of contestation, sometimes deployed in discussions about women's innovation in ritual practice in ways that evoke women's ritual agency from narrative biblical sources. In late antique incantations bowls, Aramaic term for daughters of Israel (b'not yisrael) evokes legal language of second temple marriage contracts that explicitly includes women and may have served to highlight their particular agency as well. Thus in both sets of sources, term often signals moments when women act as subjects (rather than objects) of ritual and legal discourse.

Urban Emotions Behind the Veil: An Early-Twentieth Century Muslim Wedding in Shahjahanabad

AbstractWhile scholarship on pardah nashīn or veiled women in South Asia has emphasized the links between women's ritual and urban landscape, what has received less attention is the ways that domestic spaces, affective work performed in those spaces, and material culture of the home were instrumental in mapping the South Asian city during the late colonial period. Aesthetic decisions, gift-giving, and performative critiques of the public rituals of marriage acted as loci for the self-fashioning of both the colonial-era city and women's modern selves. Through close reading of an account of the customs of Delhi by a pardah nashīn woman S. Begum Dehlavi, this article shows that veiled women mapped the city through their consumption and exchange of goods, as well as through the construction and affirmation of a complex web of families in the city.

Dance, play, laugh

Using the theme of women's ritual dance among Central African hunter-gatherers, this paper will examine an alternative kind of politics to that common in societies in which property, social hierarchy and corporatism have become the dominant structural principles. In a previous paper I described spirit performances known respectively as mokondi massana or molimo during which Mbendjele and Mbuti dancers organise into formal gender groups. These impromptu coalitions distribute social power by literally dancing it out. Here I go further in exploring the epistemological and political implications of this power-model. The part played by collective dance in releasing the socially productive power of desire is examined. And the kind of fluid sociality this movement generates is contrasted with the physical fragmentation encouraged by capitalist societies. A new model for power is developed drawing on the insights of deluze and guattari, Turner, Marcuse and recent dance and movement theory. The paper aims to demon...

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals. By PaulaArai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 263; illustrations. Cloth, $52.00.

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals. By PaulaArai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 263; illustrations. Cloth, $52.00.

A Female Imam?

In the context of a description of her career with examples from her work and experience, the author outlines Muslim women's ritual, spiritual, and intellectual scope in history, especially with regard to the contribution they made to the development of tradition and to theological thought. An insight is given into the current discussion of women's options for leadership in the Muslim community as teachers, counsellors, and mediators as well as in shaping the future.

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals. ByPaula Kane Robinson Arai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. xii, 261 pp. $52.00 (cloth).

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals. ByPaula Kane Robinson Arai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011. xii, 261 pp. $52.00 (cloth).

Bringing Zen home: the healing heart of Japanese women's rituals

This book maps new territory in Zen by explicating a domestic Zen filled with the ritual healing practices of contemporary Japanese female elders. It develops a 10-part theory on Japanese Zen Buddhist womens Way of Healing. It also analyzes how ritualized activities function in Soto Zen mode.

Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century Eliyana R. Adler Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume One, by Pauline Wengeroff, translated with an introduction, notes and commentary by Shulamit S. Magnus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 385 pp. $55.00. Fifteen years ago, with the publication of her first article on the subject, Shulamit Magnus opened up the scholarly conversation on Pauline Wengeroff. Experts in the field of modern Jewish history had access to Wengeroff 's German-language memoirs, and thanks to an excerpt published in Lucy Dawidowicz's anthology The Golden Tradition, even students knew of her existence, but until Magnus, no one had really written about Wengeroff and her life and writings. Now Magnus has taken the conversation to a new level, with the publication of the first volume of Wengeroff 's memoirs in a new English translation, with annotation and a lengthy introduction. In the introduction, Magnus jumps right into the ongoing conversation that she initiated. There is some biographical information about Wengeroff, but mainly the introduction thoroughly and skillfully problematizes Wengeroff 's writings. Despite the implied sentimentality in the title of her memoirs, she was ". . . [n]o grandmother spinning tales, Wengeroff bears the weight of her life and an age in Jewish history in her narrative. It is only with an appreciation of these complexities, especially the existence of both story line and counter-narrative in her writing, that we can begin to understand her . . ." (p. 4). [End Page 173] To reach this understanding, Magnus both engages with other scholars and provides new interpretive conclusions of her own. She suggests, for example, that the schema for understanding Jewish autobiography recently laid out by Marcus Moseley is insufficient to contain a woman like Wengeroff. According to Magnus, "Moseley's definitional criteria derive from certain types of male writing, yet categorize Jewish self-referential writing as a whole" (p. 25). Magnus then goes on to offer a broader critique of trends in modern Jewish history: Wengeroff 's work goes beyond adding a female voice to the male-authored canon of self-reflective writing about this, acting as a compensatory addition to androcentric literature. It highlights the reality of gender as a variable affecting the consciousness, experience, and expression of all who write about this passage, which can no longer be represented as oedipal rebellion (most sons did not rebel against their fathers in the first half of the nineteenth century; many did not do so even later). (p. 26) Magnus contextualizes Wengeroff within the Haskalah, but also shows how her experience differed from that of her male peers. Indeed Magnus' insights on gender are particularly significant. Magnus describes Wengeroff 's writing as neither feminist nor feminine, but "female" (p. 13). This is demonstrated most strongly in her depictions of Judaism. As Magnus shows, Wengeroff was not even herself aware of the female focus of much of her text. "The fact that Wengeroff does not notice that the candle ritual is purely female testifies to the naivite of her female identity and the degree to which female ritual was intrinsic Judaism to her—not, as we would see it, "women's ritual," but simply—Judaism" (p. 48). The introduction is followed by a series of illustrations, and then the complete text of the first volume of Wengeroff 's memoirs. In her notes to the edition, Magnus scrupulously explains all of her editing, transliteration, and translation decisions. She felt strongly about the integrity of the original text, going so far as to call abridging or reordering it "violence to the whole and to her intentions" (p. ix). Given this stance, Magnus' own decision to include photographs is somewhat surprising. "I felt," she explains, "that it was crucial to include illustrations that would bring life to description that would otherwise remain obscure and inaccessible to contemporary readers and non-specialists" (p. xi). Magnus goes on to state that the photographs are not all from Wengeroff 's lifetime or region and that she elected to keep them in a separate section to show their external nature...

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals by Paula Arai (review)

Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women's Rituals by Paula Arai (review)

Maternal Deities and the Ancestry of Humanity: The Life and Photography of Higa Yasuo

Maternal Deities and the Ancestry of Humanity: The Life and Photography of Higa Yasuo Takara Ben (bio) Translated by Katsunori Yamazato and Frank Stewart The child of Okinawan parents who emigrated to the Philippines, Higa Yasuo was born on Mindanao Island in 1938. His father was drafted into the Japanese army and died during World War II. With his mother and two siblings, he remained in the Philippines until 1946, when the family returned to Okinawa. Three years later, Higa’s mother died. Raised by his grandmother in Koza City (now Okinawa City), he graduated from high school in 1958. But because his family was poor, he could not pursue his dream of going to college. Instead, he took a job with the police force and was posted at the Kadena Police Station, near the largest American military base in all of Asia. Assigned to the crime scene investigation unit—which mainly handled cases involving American servicemen—Higa learned to use a camera, and for the next ten years he worked as a forensic and documentary photographer. In 1968, while on duty at the police station, he witnessed a fully loaded B-52 bomber crash shortly after take-off on a mission to Viet Nam. The experience was a turning point in Higa’s life: he decided to leave the police force and become a professional photographer. He moved to Tokyo and enrolled in the Tokyo School of Photography, graduating in 1971. That year, the first exhibition of his work was held. Umarejima Okinawa (Okinawa, Land of My Birth) was shown at the Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo, then travelled to Osaka, Naha, and Koza. Photographs from the exhibition were featured in the magazine Kamera mainichi, and the following year, in 1972, the Tokyo School of Photography published a collection of his work as a textbook. Through his photography, Higa was able to explore and rediscover his native island, Okinawa. In 1973, he was commissioned by a magazine to photograph Miyako, an island about two hundred miles southwest of the island of Okinawa. While in Karimata Village on Miyako, Higa witnessed the Uyagan matsuri (Ritual of Ancestral Deities), an experience so intense that it launched him on a lifelong exploration of the sacred ancient rituals of the Ryūkyūs. [End Page 60] Click for larger view View full resolution Higa Yasuo: Maternal Deities Worshipping the Gods (Kami-agami) Miyako Island, Karimata, Uyān 1974 [End Page 61] In 1975, Higa travelled to Kudaka Island, regarded since ancient times as sacred. There he met the noro (female shaman) Shizu Nishime. This meeting was another critical moment in his life. In the following months, Higa visited Kudaka Island over a hundred times, and through Shizu Nishime he was able to observe and photograph the ancient ritual known as Izaihō. In 1978, the ritual was discontinued: the shaman priestesses had dwindled in number, and there were not enough young women on the island to replace them. Before the demise of Izaihō, Higa carefully studied and recorded the rite. The collection of photographs he produced, Onna, kami, matsuri (Women, Deities, and Rites), won the thirteenth Taiyō Award. His efforts also resulted in such important works as Kamigami no shima: Okinawa Kudakajima no matsuri (The Island of Gods: Rituals of Kudaka Island, Okinawa) and Ryūkyūko: onnatachi no matsuri (The Ryūkyū Arc: Rituals of Women). In 1980, he won an Okinawa Times Encouragement Award for the exhibition Kamigami no shima Kudaka (The Island of Gods, Kudaka).* Higa’s documentation of shaman rituals in the Ryūkyūs was the beginning of a journey that took him from the spiritual roots of his homeland to the rituals and ceremonies of minority people elsewhere in Asia. By comparing female shamans of ethnic minorities worldwide—such as noro of Kudaka Island, mudang of Cheju Island, and itako and gomiso of Aomori Prefecture—Higa gained an international perspective and a profound understanding of the subject. By the 1980s, he was thus regarded as more than a fine photographer. As he fused photography with careful research in ethnography and anthropology, scholars in those fields began to acknowledge the great significance of his work. In 1990, Higa was...