Introduction: Ritual Creativity

Ritual, 1987

This article first appeared in the First Edition (1987) of the Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade,, v. 12, pp. 405-422, and is reproduced here as it was reprinted without changes (aside from a bibliographic update) in the Second Edition (2005), ed. Lindsay Jones, v. 11, pp. 7833-7848. It first presents a definition of ritual as it appears in religious contexts, and then surveys the various theoretical approaches that have dominated academic study, developing out of this an analysis that seeks to do justice to the multivalent and multileveled nature of religious ritual itself.

Rever: Revista de Estudos da Religião 5:100–107, 2005

This essay looks at recent theory of ritual. It argues that an overemphasis on texts in the study of religion has led to a misleading analysis of ritual as a symbolic site of meaning. On the other hand, attempts to study ritual on its own terms, primarily by attending to formal elements, suggest that the study of ritual is separable from the study of religion. At the same time, this work promises to give ritual studies a more central role in the study of religion.

1996

Ritual is a representative topos of both disciplines. We do not understand it as a text but a way of life in which the realization of Beauty and Good is leading to the Truthful. In this transformative process one experiences "being struck by the abyss", experience of giving to the Unknown, allowing being taken by it. In this "being-in" is the evidence of the ritual; "being-out" of it is the presumption of possibility to articulate it. Talking "happens" always from the position of the one "standing out". Therefore, the ritual as a text appears to us as a "reading without the Other", con-versing without a collocutor. To converse without a collocutor is a mere sounding of the Unessential. The momentariness of ritual encounter as the deepest dimension of "showing itself" is also a dimension of its disappearing. Attempt in catching it means its death. Only in the death of the ritual, anthropology and science of religio...

Journal of Ritual Studies , 2020

The present paper aims to investigate the role of anthropology in the development of Ritual Studies as an interdisciplinary platform, with a focus on ritual dynamics by using a historiographic description, focusing on the transition of Greco-Roman to Christian culture. This study attempts to shed light not only on the contribution of anthropology to Ritual Studies and how rituals are constantly changing, but it also underpins exploratory analysis on how religion and rituals have been researched by the first generation of scholars, like Edward Burnett Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James Frazer and Jane Ellen Harrison to scholars like Victor Turner, Ronald Grimes and more recent authors like Gil Renberg, Hedvig von Ehrenheim, Risto Uro and Richard DeMaris. Further, the goal is to clarify how anthropologists examined Christianity in Late Antiquity, thematized by the healing ritual temple sleep and stipulated by the examples used, to conclude how anthropological theories, like the liminality model of Arnold van Gennep, are applied to ritual healing. This study is innovative and challenging through the application of Ritual Studies to the transition from Greco-Roman culture to Christian culture, with emphasis on ritual and change.

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 1993

The history of Religions is in need of subdisciplines. Those that it has are mostly derived from other academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, or, to mention a more recent invention, aesthetics. Interdisciplinary studies are in many ways a characteristic, inherent feature of the humanities, and certainly not to be resented or mistrusted. It is, however, worth noticing that the History of Religions has only one discipline entirely of its own: a comparative, cross-cultural, religio-specific discipline sometimes called the phenomenology of religion. The study of ritual is more than just the study of a very broad. It is with a view to the further exploration of the way meaning and form are put to work in ritual, and the way ritual determines and conditions the form of representations, that ritualistics can be suggested as a new discipline.

Religions

If an object-centered volume on religious ritual is anything, it is a collection of contributions on material culture as a manifestation of structured symbolic practices (Fleming and Mann 2014; Grimes 2011; Keane 2008; Morgan 2008) [...]

Theorizing Rituals: Vol I: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, edited by Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg, xiii–xxv. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006

It is unclear when rituals first originated. Some assume that ritual, like dance, music, symbolism, and language, arose in the course of the evolution of primates into man, 1 or even prior to it. 2 Thus rituals may also have facilitated, or even stimulated, processes of adaptation. Be that as it may, biologists and behavioral scientists argue that there are rituals among animals, and this has important implications for our understanding of rituals. 3 Unlike animal rituals, however, sometime in the course of the evolution of (human) ritual, and in specific cultural settings, rituals have partly become the business of experts (priests). These ritual specialists, it can safely be assumed, often not only developed a ritual competence in the sense of performative skills but also began to study the rituals of their own tradition. Hence, one may assume that within this process of specialization, social differentiation, and professionalization, 4 indigenous forms of the study of rituals evolved. In contrast to the modern, mainly Western academic study of rituals, these indigenous forms of ritual studies can be referred to as 'ritualistics'. 5 * A first draft of this introduction was written by Michael Stausberg. It was then jointly revised and elaborated upon by the editors of this volume. We wish to thank Ingvild S. Gilhus (Bergen) and Donald Wiebe (Toronto) for helpful comments on a previous draft. 1 See also Bellah 2003. (Here, as throughout the volume, works listed in the annotated bibliography are referred to by author and year only. Those items not listed in the bibliography will be provided with full references in the notes.) 2 Staal 1989, 111 states: "Ritual, after all, is much older than language." See also Burkert 1972. 3 See Baudy in this volume. 4 See Gladigow 2004. 5 See Stausberg 2003. Although a small group of us began using the term at American Academy of Religion meetings, today it has wide currency in a large number of disciplines" (p. 1). See also Grimes 1982 and his bibliography, Research in Ritual Studies (Grimes 1985). In terms of the establishment of a new field of research, see also his article on ritual studies in the Encyclopedia of Religion from 1987. 8 See, e.g., Grimes 1990; Bell 1997. 9 Over the last five years, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) funded two large-scale research programs on rituals: Kulturen des Performativen (Sonderforschungsbereich 447 [http://www.sfb-performativ.de] since 1999) and Ritualdynamik (Sonderforschungsbereich 619 [http://www.ritualdynamik.uni-hd.de] since 2002). Some contributors to the current volume are members of the former (Christoph Wulf) or the latter (Dietrich Harth, Axel Michaels, William S. Sax, and Jan A.M. Snoek). 10 The editors themselves were members of a junior research group, Ritualistik

Numen, 2008

Birds do it. Bees do it. Rituals are common in nature. In our own lineage rituals runs rampant. Why this is so, and how best to examine human rituals, remains some of the most intriguing and contested questions facing scholarly inquiry.