Ritual Criticism

Ritual Criticism PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781453758243
Category : North America
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to a topic seldom written about: the evaluation of rites. Enacting ritual and thinking critically are often imagined as mutually exclusive activities, but Ritual Criticism demonstrates their complementarity by presenting case studies in which ritual and criticism require one another. The cases are drawn from contemporary, urban, North American social contexts in which specific rites are undergoing evaluation, interpretation, or revision. The cases eventuate in essays, more theoretical treatments of critical issues in ritual studies. The rituals studied are as varied as the strategies utilized. The diversity of approaches illustrates the ways criticism shifts as types of ritual vary. One rite is a traditional liturgy; another is invented rather than traditional; a third is a hybrid ritual drama; and in a fourth instance the ritualization is so tacit that some would deny that it is ritual at all. Many of the contexts that provide data for the chapters are typified by syncretism, the eclectic mixing and matching of ritual elements from diverse traditions. Other examples involve attempts to engage in ritual invention and experimentation. The essays are likewise diverse, taking readers into territories traditionally the purview of several disciplines. Drama, literature, education, psychology, medicine, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology are traversed in this effort to understand ritual, an unusually complex genre of human activity.

Ritual Criticism

Ritual Criticism PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781453758243
Category : North America
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to a topic seldom written about: the evaluation of rites. Enacting ritual and thinking critically are often imagined as mutually exclusive activities, but Ritual Criticism demonstrates their complementarity by presenting case studies in which ritual and criticism require one another. The cases are drawn from contemporary, urban, North American social contexts in which specific rites are undergoing evaluation, interpretation, or revision. The cases eventuate in essays, more theoretical treatments of critical issues in ritual studies. The rituals studied are as varied as the strategies utilized. The diversity of approaches illustrates the ways criticism shifts as types of ritual vary. One rite is a traditional liturgy; another is invented rather than traditional; a third is a hybrid ritual drama; and in a fourth instance the ritualization is so tacit that some would deny that it is ritual at all. Many of the contexts that provide data for the chapters are typified by syncretism, the eclectic mixing and matching of ritual elements from diverse traditions. Other examples involve attempts to engage in ritual invention and experimentation. The essays are likewise diverse, taking readers into territories traditionally the purview of several disciplines. Drama, literature, education, psychology, medicine, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology are traversed in this effort to understand ritual, an unusually complex genre of human activity.

Ritual Criticism

Ritual Criticism PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Columbia, S.C. : University of South Carolina Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


The Dangers of Ritual

The Dangers of Ritual PDF Author: Philippe Buc
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691144427
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Central to current understandings of medieval history is the concept of political ritual, encompassing events from coronations to funerals, entries into cities, civic games, banquets, hunting, acts of submission or commendation, and more. ''Ritual?'' asks Philippe Buc. In The Dangers of Ritual he boldly argues that the concept shouldn't be so central after all. Modern-day scholars, gently seduced by twentieth-century theories of ritual, often misinterpret medieval documents that ostensibly describe such events, in part because they fail to appreciate the intentions behind them. The book begins with four case studies whose arrangement--backward from texts on tenth-century kingship to fourth-century representations of Christian martyrdom--allows for the line of development to be peeled back layer by layer. It then turns to an analysis of the formation of the intellectual traditions that contemporary historians have employed to interpret medieval documents. Tracing the emergence of the concept of ritual from the Reformation to the mid-twentieth century, Buc highlights the continuities yet also the profound transformations between the early medieval understandings and our own, social-scientific models. Medieval historians will find this book an indispensable resource for its insights into methodological issues crucial to their discipline. As Buc demonstrates, only rigorous attention to the contexts within which authors worked can allow us to reconstruct from medieval documents how ''rituals'' might have functioned. Ultimately, he argues, too swift an application of contemporary models to highly complex textual artifacts blinds us to the specificities of early medieval European political culture.

The Craft of Ritual Studies

The Craft of Ritual Studies PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195301420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Readership: Students and scholars of ritual studies, religious studies, anthropology

The Last Ritual

The Last Ritual PDF Author: S A Sidor
Publisher: Aconyte
ISBN: 1839080132
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A mad surrealist’s art threatens to rip open the fabric of reality, in this twisted tale of eldritch horror and conspiracy, from the wildly popular world of Arkham Horror. Aspiring painter Alden Oakes is invited to join a mysterious art commune in Arkham: the New Colony. When celebrated Spanish surrealist Juan Hugo Balthazarr visits the colony, Alden and the other artists quickly fall under his charismatic spell. Balthazarr throws a string of decadent parties for Arkham’s social elite, conjuring arcane illusions which blur the boundaries between nightmare and reality. Only slowly does Alden come to suspect that Balthazarr’s mock rituals are intended to break through those walls and free what lies beyond. Alden must act, but it might already be too late to save himself, let alone Arkham.

This is the Ritual

This is the Ritual PDF Author: Rob Doyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632865378
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"A tremendous talent. Every page fizzes with vitality." --Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone A young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a breakup finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend's red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland's vanished literary outlaw? Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker's roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book's pages. Layering narratives and splicing fiction with non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain. Immersive, at times dreamlike, and frank in its depiction of sex, the writer's life, failed ideals, and the transience of emotions, it introduces an unmistakable new literary voice.

Beginnings in Ritual Studies

Beginnings in Ritual Studies PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781453752623
Category : Performing arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Beginnings in Ritual Studies lays the groundwork for the interdisciplinary study of ritual by broadening the conception of it and articulating its connections to a wide range of cultural activities. Accessible to scholars and students, Beginnings addresses such fundamental issues as definitions, types, and theories of ritual. The volume integrates field research and theory in considering ritual's relation to religious, civil, medical, and theatrical dimensions of culture. The first and second editions garnered widespread praise from the scholarly community and became a standard work in the burgeoning field of ritual studies. In this third edition, Grimes adds a new preface and revises the descriptive and theoretical essays that form the core of the volume.

Ritual, Media, and Conflict

Ritual, Media, and Conflict PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199831302
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice PDF Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199760381
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Ritual studies today figures as a central element of religious discourse for many scholars around the world. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell's sweeping and seminal work on the subject, helped legitimize the field. In this volume, Bell re-examines the issues, methods, and ramifications of our interest in ritual by concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Now with a new foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace, Bell's work is a must-read for understanding the evolution of the field of ritual studies and its current state.

Readings in Ritual Studies

Readings in Ritual Studies PDF Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Pearson
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive collection of articles on ritual ever assembled. The book includes selections by internationally known scholars such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, as well as innovative piece s that illustrate the extraordinary interdisciplinary range of contemporary ritual studies. Grimes has drawn readings from the entire range of ritual--encompassing its secular, political and dramatic expressions as well as its religious ones.