Papers by Ronald L. Grimes
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2019
Liminalities, 2017
A Daughter's Song is a short film that I made about a Condolence Ceremony enacted in 2014 by Moha... more A Daughter's Song is a short film that I made about a Condolence Ceremony enacted in 2014 by Mohawks among artists, Jews, and Muslims. It was an interritual event, challenging popular and scholarly assumptions about ritual, for instance, that it is primarily backward-looking or that it necessarily consolidates an in-group against an out-group. The Mohawk Condolence Ceremony, which has a long and venerable history, provides the central gestures of this film. The ceremony is not only traditional but also forward-looking, and it constructs bridges across chasms dividing groups. A Daughter's Song illustrates how commemoration and death rituals are not only about remembering the past but also about re-framing the present and envisioning the future. "Interrituality" is the term ritual studies scholars use to describe rituals that transpire in the "spaces" between traditions. 1 Since such spaces lie in the interstices, they are, by Victor Turner's definition, liminal. In Latin limen means threshold, so for Turner, liminality is a mediating space located "betwixt and between." However, a bridge is perhaps more apt in the case of interrituality.
The Sociological Review, Oct 1, 2003
We are in a mess. The ecological fabric has been ripped, and the fleet-of-foot rescue teams have ... more We are in a mess. The ecological fabric has been ripped, and the fleet-of-foot rescue teams have arrived already. The not so fleet are still on their way. Some passers-by are fleeing the scene. A few are stopping, offering advice and bandaids or even bulldozers. Other, less metallic, resuscitation devices are showing up too—among them, ritual. Few people consider rites an effective means for saving the planet from environmental destruction. Ask the ordinary person, ‘Should we expect anything of environmental significance from ritual or performance?’ and the reply will probably be, ‘No. Why would anyone even raise such a question?’ Yet we are witnessing the emergence of groups and individuals who consider it obvious that ritual is one, if not the, answer to the environmental conundrum. They consider it urgent that humans learn, or re-learn, ritual ways of becoming attuned to their environments. Let me give you some examples. The story of evolution is being told as myth and used as a script to inspire ritual activities. Miriam Therese McGillis leads the Cosmic Walk, a symbolic reenactment of the epic of evolution as told by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in The Universe Story (Swimme and Berry, 1992). Participants meditatively walk a path marked by a coil of rope representing the chronology of earth’s emergence and evolution. Ecological restorationists such as William Jordan III are attempting to spark the ritualizing of pragmatic actions, such as prairie burnings, that restore degraded environments (Jordan, 1993; Jordan, 1992). Restoration Management & Notes, a publication that Jordan edits, issued a playful but serious call for scientist-shaman-performer-storytellers who might help construct eco-rituals:
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1975
N interpreter of ritual must pay serious attention to the surfaces of things. Even if one assumes... more N interpreter of ritual must pay serious attention to the surfaces of things. Even if one assumes that a ritual performance implies a deep structure, access to that structure leads through an exterior which, as Boehme and Paracelsus suggested, bears the "signature" of an essential interior. But reading a signature on an exterior is no easy matter. Only recently in the emerging field of kinesics have we begun systematically to write a grammar of gesture with sufficient precision that we might learn to speak as penetratingly of symbolic actions as of words and sentences. I think ritual studies ought ultimately to collaborate with anthropology and psychology in producing some rather careful, detailed microkinesic studies of religious body motion along the lines illustrated by Ray Birdwhistell's provocative analyses of diaper changing, smoking, and smiling in his Kinesics and Context.' Meanwhile, I would like to offer a broader phenomenological sketch of one kind of ritual gesture, namely, masking. By "masking" I mean to include what we ordinarily think of as masks, but I also intend to encompass any mode of facial stylization, including make-up and even the expressions we wear. My concern is not the ethnographic one of describing and classifying kinds of masks, nor is it the historical one of interpreting a set of masks in a specific temporal and cultural setting. Rather, I propose to inquire into the possibilities of the act of masking. My question is, "In what ways might we interpret the act of donning a mask regardless of who wears it and what it looks like?" I will offer here a typology of four moments in the masking process: (1) concretion, (2) concealment, (3) embodiment, and (4) expression. First, however, I must say a word about the problem of definition. It might seem a simple matter to decide what a mask is, but the variety of phenomena complicates the matter. The Dogon have a "Great Mask" (iminana) which is displayed every sixty years and which is nearly thirty feet long. Obviously, no one wears it. Yet it is a mask despite its lack of an animate human figure inside. Masks are sometimes treated as sculpture by art historians and aesthetic anthropologists, but such treatments ignore the illusion of "wearableness" which separates mask
Culture and religion, May 1, 2000
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2019
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Mar 13, 2019
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Sep 1, 1990
Based on 15 months of field study, Badone’s ethnography is a richly textured study of death in Br... more Based on 15 months of field study, Badone’s ethnography is a richly textured study of death in Brittany. Though not in conversation with some of the contemporary literature of ritual studies, it contains a wealth of detail about cemeteries, mourning, funerals and other ritual processes in northwestern France, and thus could easily serve as a model for fieldwork-based studies in religion. Badone argues that mortuary practices in rural village life are undergoing rapid secularization and deritualization. Following Phillippe Aries, she thinks the resulting privatization of death eventuates in a denial of death. Unlike him, she is able to link this shift in world view to social and demographic changes. Badone, an anthropologist and religion scholar at McMaster University, has an agenda similar to that of Clifford Geertz, whose influence on her work is formative. She concentrates on the interface between meaning, local knowledge and indigenous points of view on the one hand and social structures, larger Western trends and observer-contributed theory on the other. The book strikes a rare balance between sensitive description and theoretical sophistication, as well as between religious and anthropological concerns-a first-rate contribution to the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1982
Canadian Theatre Review
The Actor’s Lab, a professional research and performance ensemble from Hamilton, Ontario, was fou... more The Actor’s Lab, a professional research and performance ensemble from Hamilton, Ontario, was founded in 1971 on the campus of McMaster University by Richard Nieoczym, then a student of religious studies and philosophy. Influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s root work on the actor and those elements which psychologically stand in the way of the actor, the Lab today conducts activities ranging from occasional public performances (including periodic para-theatrical events) to special performance workshops and conferences. Continual group and personal research in the form of ‘studies’ is maintained as an ongoing activity by the Lab’s six members, all of whom are in their 20’s and 30’s and come from Catholic or Protestant, Anglophone backgrounds. As suggested by its original name, Le Théâtre de I’Homme, the Lab has always tried to achieve a theatre of essential man and essential actions. Its themes, gestures, settings and rhythms are consequently quite typically elemental and non-narrative wit...
American Anthropologist, 1986
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 17, 2006
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 17, 2006
Uploads
Papers by Ronald L. Grimes