Ritual Studies have achieved prominence since the 1980s, when interest in ritual as an object of inquiry was established, bridging over a number of humanities and social science disciplines. Both connected with religious studies and independent of it; overlapping with social and cultural anthropology, but also with history; related to science and health practices and ranging across the life course to education, Ritual Studies has come to encompass studies of change and dynamism in social life. Rituals are determinate in form, but not static. They enunciate distinctive social values within specific contexts that frame them; and they relate to the wider concerns and issues of their practitioners.
Due to this broad and wide-ranging scope, it is often difficult to find a single resource on Ritual Studies, and even more so to find one which moves beyond the beginnings of anthropological theorizing to grapple with the present-day contexts of ritual. Bringing togetherrecent ethnographies of ritual practice and ritualization from across the globe, this Handbook provides case study of ritual in the light of Emotion and Cognition, Identity, Religious Power, Performance and Literature, Ecology and Ecological Disaster, Media, and other topics. While each chapter provides a deep ethnography of a specific society, ritual, or ritualized practice, each also engages with current theoretical and substantive approaches to the relevant topic.
The scholars collected here provide original synoptic and indicative pieces as guideposts and pathways through the complex, varied and cross-disciplinary, and vast landscape of scholarship that constitutes Ritual Studies today and points to developments in the future.
This handbook showcases a set of exemplary contemporary studies on a wide range of topics in Ritual Studies, based on firsthand ethnographic research. The studies are chosen to demonstrate the scope of current theorizing on ritual practices, illuminated by the field experience of the authors. Each chapter highlights a specific concern with the process of theorizing, along with explication of how theory emerges from the ethnography, using an interpretive approach. The topics cover classic fields of study, such as shamanic practices, sorcery and witchcraft, sacrifice, religious pilgrimages and individual experience, inter-rituality and the compatibility of practices, temple organization and cultural intimacy, empathy and the situations of migrants and asylum seekers, sport and the construction of identities, performance studies, social exchange and sharing, ritual innovation, hospitality, cognition, mortuary practices, Pentecostal Christianity, and revivals and the reconstitution of charisma over time. Throughout the volume there is an emphasis on creativity and change in ritual practices over time, in counterpoint to the conventional view that rituals represent continuity and stability in social life.
The scholars collected here provide pathways through the complex and cross-disciplinary landscape of Ritual Studies today, and ultimately point to developments in the future. Edited by two of the most prominent Ritual Studies researchers active today, this volume should serve as an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the field for years to come.
Pamela J. Stewart is Senior Research Associate in Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Andrew J. Strathern is Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Stewart and Strathern have a long history of joint publications and research, with nearly fifty book publications and over two hundred co-authored articles. They are the long-standing co-editors of the Journal of Ritual Studies, and co-editors of the book series Ritual Studies and the volume Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion (2014).
