Preface to the Special Issue

On the liminal relationship and its zone between sea & land

After the Second World War, most rituals connected with agricultural (manual) work died out along with the economic and social base of such activities. This also caused the gradual omission of some classical ethnological concepts and themes and diminishing interest for such research topics. However, some such rituals survived until the present in a modified form and with new purpose and are enacted either in families (related to the traditional belief in the power of nature) or in local communities (in tourism contexts). New rituals also emerge since farmers, who face new challenges in selling produce and products, ritualize selling at public events to attract customers. The shift in perception of tradition by the general population in turn revived the ethnological interest for such phenomena. The article analyses the methodological changes in ritual research, as are reflected in European ethnology, and illustrate the changing of contexts with the case-study in the vicinity of Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana. In connection with the notion of rural idyll and heritage tourism, ritualization of everyday farming activities has been used as a strategy for improvement of living. Traditional and new agricultural rituals have become a means for sustainable development and identity politics; they add to regeneration of the local economy, affect a sense of belonging and integration of the local population .

Traditiones, 2012

How do we identify ritual in a prehistoric context. Once we identify it what can we say that is constructive, through the available evidence and how can we illuminate the society of that time by studying ritual? The case of Minoan open air sanctuaries is here explored, looking at how established were the rituals taking place there and then.

2017

The 'ritual landscape' is result of maintenance of sacredness and of reciprocal and interfacing relationship between human faith and landscapes in the trajectory of 'time-space-ritual' routines through variety of rituals and performing functionaries. The bank of the Sarayu River at Ayodhya consists of a number of sacred places where devout pilgrims perform variety of the rituals that emerged to form a distinct ritual landscape, thus developed ritualscapes. Ayodhya is the sacred place not only for Hindus, but also to other religious groups, like Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Muslims; that is how multicultural ritual landscapes emerged. Every year around 1.9 million pilgrims pay visit to Ayodhya, and pay visit to variety of sacred places and perform rituals, including sacred walks along the three important pilgrimage routes, i.e. Panchakroshi, Chaudahkroshi, and Chaurasikroshi. The present paper describes the historical and mythological values of varying components of ritual landscapes in the frame of variety of religious places, and finally attempts to develop Ayodhya as a city of global understanding and harmony. Keywords: ritual landscapes, ritualscapes, sacredscapes, faithscapes, pilgrimage and routes, religious heritage.

Time and Mind, 2021

In past decades landscapes have become recognized as essentially liminal systems: there has been an increased appreciation for the embeddedness of lived experiences of places in four-dimensional space-time and the landscape's connections with perceptions, stories, the material and immaterial pasts, as well as the material and immaterial present and future. Kilpisjärvi is such a place where immaterial pasts, presents, and futures consolidate into lived experiences. Intimate narratives of the local inhabitants and enveloping environment are produced through the intermingling of traditional ways of living and being with the development of modern perspectives and infrastructures. This photo essay glimpses at the flow of interconnected stories of becoming of an Arctic village's lifeworld. It glances at what has never been built nor written down, what has been built over, the local anecdotes that speak to these, and how this amalgamation of interweaving materiality and disembodiment shape an understanding of Kilpisjärvi and its inhabitants from an insiders and outsiders perspective. The essay takes the reader through the liminal landscapes of reindeer, reindeer herders, tourist organizations, and village life, and its analysis advances our understanding of how these all connect in a meshwork that teaches old and new ways of viewing the environment.

2019

The Mukkala burial ground consists of eight excavated inhumation burials that all date to the middle of the 17th century and 1-2 nearby shaman burials from the beginning of the century. The site was excavated by Jorma Leppäaho in the 1930s. Since its discovery, Mukkala is of importance as one of the few excavated Sámi burial grounds and the only one representing the later extinct Forest Sámi population in Finland. The aim of this paper is to reveal the quality of the Forest Sámi culture of the Sompio Lapp village, when the cultural assimilation into the neighbouring populations was already under way. The paper concentrates on the organic material excavated in Mukkala, the burial ground of the Sompio Lapp village. First, we present the textiles which were made for everyday use by weaving, knitting, naalebinding (nål(e)binding, one needle knitting), and braiding. Second, we study the remains of animal skins, which were used for wrapping the deceased and for fur shoes and pouches. Finally, we recognize both the continuity of age-old circumpolar traditions, novelties in local production and dyeing of textiles, and the acquiring of commodities by trade.

This paper outlines an archaeological approach to rituals that separates ritual (praxis) from religion or belief (doxa). Rather than trying to elucidate what people may have thought, we suggest focusing on ritual as action; these actions have a huge communicative and transformative potential and thus it is their effect on society that interests us here. This social efficacy can be scrutinized archaeologically in the longue durée. We apply this understanding to a new approach to the study of hoards and deposits. These, too, are understood as the results of ritual action, i.e. sequenced and communicative practice that involves handling and manipulating cultural knowledge, reproducing and maybe altering it, thus affecting social identities and relations. We therefore suggest focusing on the depositional practice rather than the motivations behind deposition. Moreover we suggest proceeding from the understanding of depositions as ritual actions to analysing what effect they had on space and how they simultaneously were directed by culturally perceived spatial structures.

In order to understand ritual in the past, archaeology has long relied on theories developed in other disciplines. While these theories, which often rely on written or oral information, have added many important dimensions to our interpretation of the archaeological record, they have often proven difficult to successfully articulate with the archaeological sources. Moreover, archaeology has tended to remain on the receiving end of the formulation of social theory, and has only rarely participated in the theoretical development and critique. In this article we argue that we see a central role for archaeology to contribute to the development of ritual theory. Through two case studies from Scandinavian prehistory we illustrate how the application of a practice-based ritual theory allows us to more firmly connect the theoretical framework to our archaeological sources. This connection not only leads us toward a synchronization of materials, methods and theories, but it also allows us to engage in the broader interdisciplinary theoretical discussion about ritual. The specific challenges posed by the archaeological sources and the archaeological process of interpretation point to new questions relating to the application of theoretical frameworks, and may even suggest some solutions.

Reassembling Democracy, 2021

The main objective of this review is to consider what archaeology can contribute to general anthropological theories on "ritual in its own right" and to highlight the potential for advancing knowledge about ritual experience as a distinctive material process. An examination of the exceptional material frame marking ceremonial events demonstrates the value of ritual as a heuristic and challenges archaeologists who privilege the interpretation of religion, affect, ontology, or cultural rationalities as necessarily determinative of the ritualization process. Therefore, archaeologists should not interpret ritual places and residues as immediate proxies of other sociopolitical realities but instead should base their inferences on cross-contextual analyses of archaeological data sets. Ultimately, attention to the amplified materialization of the ritual process, often entailing the performative bundling of disparate material items in archaeological deposits, permits a re-evaluation of theories proposing that ritual is intimately connected to agency and power.

BRILL eBooks, 2024

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Introduction: Ritual Creativity This book brings together leading international scholars of religion from a variety of disciplines with the aim of casting light on the topic of ritual studies within contemporary studies of religion. The contemporary studies of religion consist of an array of interconnected fields and the present volume explores the role played by rituals in the following emergent areas: new spiritualities and ecology, religion and embodiment, and indigenous religions. In addition, the volume offers a selection of regional perspectives on ritual studies from African Christianity and Islam which includes contemporary negotiations of identity and coloniality. The collected volume offers a combination of significant theoretical and methodological discussions as well as previously understudied topics in the contemporary studies of religion. The book addresses readers from a wide range of disciplines. It will be of interest to and relevance for both students and researchers within the larger fields of ritual and religious studies, as well as anthropology and environmental humanities. The volume is not only a broad exploration of the importance of ritual in the contemporary studies of religion but also a way to honour a fellow scholar whose academic pursuits during her thirty-year career illustrate the interconnectedness and value of cross-pollination between several disciplines. The work of Professor Anne-Christine Hornborg embodies the innovative and fruitful ways in which ritual perspectives can be applied to a broader context within the contemporary study of religions. In 2001 Professor Hornborg published the well-received study A Landscape of Left-Overs (2001) based on fieldwork among Nova Scotia's first nation Mi'kmaq. Since then, Professor Hornborg has published many important contributions in ritual studies based on her other fieldwork in locations such as Tonga and Peru. These insights have been disseminated in a number of ways within the study of contemporary religion, demonstrating the persistence of ritual and religion in our own secular and consumerist societies. The chapters in the present volume are all inspired by the work of Professor Hornborg, in particular, the methodological and theoretical contributions she has offered throughout her long career. Some chapters revisit the contexts in which Professor Hornborg carried out long periods of fieldwork. This book takes as its point of departure the great potential which we, the editors and contributors, believe is found in interdisciplinary approaches, and to which Professor Hornborg's career is a testament. Professor Hornborg's contributions to the study of rituals showcases the importance of ritual perspectives-9789004692206 Downloaded from Brill.

MASF 7. Helsinki harvest: proceedings of the 11th nordic conference on the application of scientific methods in archaeology., 2019

The Mukkala burial ground consists of eight excavated inhumation burials that all date to the middle of the 17th century and 1-2 nearby shaman burials from the beginning of the century. The site was excavated by Jorma Leppäaho in the 1930s. Since its discovery, Mukkala is of importance as one of the few excavated Sámi burial grounds and the only one representing the later extinct Forest Sámi population in Finland. The aim of this paper is to reveal the quality of the Forest Sámi culture of the Sompio Lapp village, when the cultural assimilation into the neighbouring populations was already under way. The paper concentrates on the organic material excavated in Mukkala, the burial ground of the Sompio Lapp village. First, we present the textiles which were made for everyday use by weaving, knitting, naalebinding (nål(e)binding, one needle knitting), and braiding. Second, we study the remains of animal skins, which were used for wrapping the deceased and for fur shoes and pouches. Finally, we recognize both the continuity of age-old circumpolar traditions, novelties in local production and dyeing of textiles, and the acquiring of commodities by trade.