RELIGION AND RITUAL PERFORMANCE

Religion, Theatre, and Performance, from Acts of Faith, 27-41. Ed. Lance Gharavi. New York: Routledge,, 2012

Religion, ritual, and performance are troublesome as categories. Because they are central to academic disciplines, their definitions are contested. Ritual presents double the trouble, because some scholars, assuming ritual to be both performative and religious, use it as a bridging concept between the other two. Religion is a problem for two reasons. One is that many religious people neither know nor use the word. They keep to proper nouns such as Judaism and Islam or constructions such as the Navaho way. Others prefer generic terms such as spirituality, faith, and belief. Either way, people often object that religion connotes either a social sector or institution, and religion, they say, is rather a whole way of life, not merely some highly valued part of it. A second reason that religion causes conceptual trouble is that scholars investigating the history of the idea show that the word as we currently use it is of recent vintage and its purview, largely Western. 1 One prominent religious studies scholar even argues that religion is a category invented by scholars. Like every other key academic concept, these have a history and come with baggage; it could hardly be otherwise. However, since most of us scholars continue using the terms, we have obligations. One is to say what we mean by the debated terms, but the other is to resist becoming so bogged down in terminological quibbling that we are disabled from conducting research among real people in actual situations. It is increasingly common for North Americans to say they are spiritual but not religious. Since laying a conceptual wall between religion and spirituality is misleading, I define both terms in ways that assume their interconnectedness. Spirituality, I suggest, is life lived in search of, or in resonance with, fundamental principles and powers, usually symbolized as first, last, deepest, highest, or most central, and religion is spirituality organized into a tradition, system, or institution and typically consisting of a set of interacting processes:

Asian Theatre Journal, 2014

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.

Emerging Ritual in Secular Societies. A Transdisciplinary Conversation, 2017

Attached: Introduction, Notes on Contributors. This collection of articles is a thoughtful examination of the history, function and place of emerging rituals. The discussion goes beyond academic assessment and acknowledgement of the absence of meaningful ritual to focus on the different ways people are responding to the call for ‘new rituals’. It recognises the extent to which sincere ritualisation is essential to the physical, psychological and spiritual health of individuals, family groups, organisations and even society as a whole. Contributors: 13 authors, 15 transdisciplinary fields: - Ellen Dissanayake, hon. PhD, an independent scholar focusing on 'the anthropological exploration of art and culture’. Seattle, Washington, USA - Matthieu Smyth, PhD, Ritual Anthropologist, Professor at the University of Strasbourg. - Robert C. Scaer, M.D., Neurologist, Psychologist, currently retired from clinical medical practice. Louisville, Colorado, USA. - Jeltje Gordon-Lennox, M.Div, Psychotherapist and Celebrant Trainer, Ashoka Association, Geneva, Switzerland. - Andrés Allemand Smaller, journalist and secular celebrant in Geneva, Switzerland. - Christine Behrend, marketing and consumer behaviour researcher and a secular celebrant in Pully, Switzerland. - Isabel Russo, Head of Ceremonies at The British Humanist Association, London, UK. - Michael Picucci, PhD, Psychologist, licensed psychotherapist, New York City, USA. - Joanna Wojtkowiak, PhD, Cultural psychologist, Assistant professor at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. - Lindy Mechefske, journalist and food-writer in Kingston, Canada. - Irene Stengs, PhD, Cultural Anthropologist, Senior Researcher Fellow at the Meertens Instituut, Co-editor of Anthropological Journal Etnofoor, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. - Gianpiero Vincenzo, MA, sociologist, islamist, art critic and novelist; Professor of sociology at the Fine Arts Academy of Catania in Sicily, Italy. - Jacqueline Millner, PhD, is Associate Dean Research, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney - Ida van der Lee, ritual artist, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Publication date: early 2017

The religious intellectualism is one of the active intellectual current in the Iran which has been criticized in different ways. One of the critical aspects is how to deal with rituals and religious' practices. Most of these criticisms are general and theoretical without regard to the audiences. The issue of this research is the ritual of audiences and their understandings' and perceptions'. This research was performed with qualitative methods and techniques of observation, interview, study the speech of religious intellectuals and finally analysis of all data content. Husseiniye Ershad, one of the most important religious intellectual bases, had been chosen and the intellectuals who were active there in 2000-2010 and their audiences' had been studied. The results show religious intellectuals have imprecise stance about ritual which can be because of response to the current formalism in country, limitation in accumulation and use of media, and not having clear pattern. The most important internal reason is not having clear pattern about ritual, and it can be explained with some arguments; first, criticism of formalism and originality of the content of religion and therefore trivialized form of religion, second, individualism and importance of individual choosing and directly relationship with God, and finally, rationalism which has created utilitarianism, goal oriented and original oriented.

Practical Theology, 2018

As a subject of anthropological concern, ritual emerged from the study of religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bell 1997, Warburg 2016). It was not until 1977, when Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff published their seminal edited volume, that anthropologists directly engaged with the idea of 'secular' ritual, and their book set the agenda for further anthropological inquiry. In particular, Moore and Myerhoff questioned whether theories of ritual, originally devised to explain religious or spiritual ceremonies, could be useful in understanding secular ritual. They asserted that, because of its association with religion, ritual has too often been approached as a subcategory of religion instead of as a category of social action in and of itself. Yet, they argue that secular ritual can be just as significant to social life as religious ritual undoubtedly is and that as a category it deserves consideration. The momentum generated by their volume garnered some attention from anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s, though, after the initial surge of interest, secular ritual has received comparatively very little attention in the anthropological literature since. One explanation for the seeming paucity of work on distinctly secular ritual is the fact that scholars have found it difficult, if not impossible, to locate any theoretical differences in anthropological approaches to 'religious' and 'secular' rituals respectively (Warburg 2016, Asad 2003). Yet at the same time, ethnographic studies of religious rituals overwhelmingly outnumber those of rituals deemed secular or non-religious, and the question remains whether or not ritual should be approached as a 'neutral' social action that cannot be placed into either a 'religious' or 'secular' category, only being interpreted as religious or secular by participants, and whether there is any value in distinguishing between the two. More recently,

Performing Religion: Actors, contexts, and texts. Case Studies on Islam, 2016

Performing Religion investigates the relationship of texts, actors, and contexts in the study of Islam. Hitherto research in Islamic Studies has taken texts primarily as information medium. This volume emphasizes the material quality of texts, both written and oral. It focuses on the sound and rhythm of its performance, on non-verbal elements, and practices of framing and embedding. Performing Religion also looks at the interpretation of religious practices without lengthy textual foundations which nevertheless constitute an important part of the believers’ lives. The assembled case studies encompass contemporary as well as historic perspectives and include examples from Andalusia, Egypt, Italy, Greater Syria, Turkey, Central Asia, Yemen, Iran, and India. Part I explores objects, actions, and notions in the context of the acquisition of blessing (baraka). Part II asks how believers use, alter, publically enact texts in ritual settings and what kinds of performances are inscribed into the text. Part III analyses the negotiation of meanings, aesthetics, and identity which occurs in new, often transcultural contexts. Rather than viewing texts as repository of ideas, the present volume accentuates their ritual functions and aesthetic experiences.