Ritual in Its Own Right (eBook)

Galina Lindquist (1955-2008) was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She received her Ph.D. in 1998, and did fieldwork among neo-shamans in Sweden, among alternative healing practitioners and patients in Moscow, and among shamans and lamas in Tyva, Southern Siberia. She authored Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (2006), The Quest for the Authentic Shaman: Multiple Meanings of Shamanism on a Siberian Journey (2006), co-edited four volumes, and published numerous articles in professional journals.

Born in Montreal, Don Handelman is Sarah Allen Shaine Professor of Anthropology & Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1971. He has been a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Collegium Budapest: Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Study at The Hebrew University, and the Olof Palme Visiting Professor of the Swedish Social Science Research Council. His field research has been in the Great Basin, Newfoundland, Israel, and Andhra Pradesh. He has written extensively on ritual, play, expressive culture, and bureaucratic logic and the modern state, and is the author of Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, Berghahn Books, 1998; Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events, 2004; and with David Shulman is the coauthor of God Inside Out: Siva's Game of Dice (1997) and Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self Knowledge (2004).

Preface

Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?
Don Handelman

PART I: THEORIZING RITUAL: AGAINST REPRSENTATION, AGAINST MEANING

Chapter 1. Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning
Bruce Kapferer

Chapter 2. Otherwise Than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual
Don Seeman

PART II: EXPERIMENTING WITH RITUAL: NATIVES HERE, NATIVES THERE

Chapter 3. The Red and the Black: A Practical Experiment for Thinking about Ritual
Michael Houseman

Chapter 4. Partial Discontinuity: The Mark of Ritual
André Iteanu

PART III: RITUAL AND EMERGENCE: HISTORICAL, PHENOMENAL

Chapter 5. Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West
Piroska Nagy

Chapter 6. Enjoying an Emerging Alternative World: Ritual in Its Own Ludic Right
André Droogers

PART IV: HEALING IN ITS OWN RIGHT: SPIRIT WORLDS

Chapter 7. Bringing the Soul Back to the Self: Soul Retrieval in Neo-shamanism
Galina Lindquist

Chapter 8. Treating the Sick with a Morality Play: The Kardecist-Spiritist Disobsession in Brazil
Sidney M. Greenfield

PART V: PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING

Chapter 9. The Tacit Logic of Ritual Embodiments: Rappaport and Polanyi between Thick and Thin
Robert E. Innis

Epilogue: Toing and Froing the Social
Don Handelman

Notes on Contributors
Index