Ritual in Its Own Right

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