A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, Ritual Textuality presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.
How do rituals achieve their effects? Matt Tomlinson approaches this classic question from a new angle, arguing that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns.
E. Brashier). The scholarly originality of these essays rests firmly on their authors’ control over ancient sources, newly excavated materials, and modern scholarship across all major Sinological languages.
... biblical rituals , constructions of spatiality and their relationship to actual ritual spaces in the Levant , 42 or ... Persian Period as a Test Case , ed . C. Frevel , K. Pyschny , and I. Cornelius , OBO 267 ( Freiburg : Academic Press ...
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible contain a significant number of texts describing ritual practices. Yet it is often unclear how these sources would have been understood or used by ancient audiences in the actual performance of cult.
Words and Deeds is a collection of articles on rituals in South Asia with a special focus on their texts and context. The volume presupposes that a comprehensive definition of "ritual" does not exist.
In this essay, I want to follow three strands in the underlying debate.
... ritual practice. Current research cannot rate the ratio between meaning and practice. That said, the function of ... textuality of ritual in terms of written traditions, ritual texts or textual rituals are related to performance, even if ...
Among the Weyewa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, spokesmen seek to inscribe their traditions and sacred obligations through ritual speaking performances.
La mémoire perdue : A la recherche des archives oubliées , publiques et privées , de la Rome antique . ... The Books of the Pontifices . ... Gebet und Fluch , Zeichen und Traum : Aspekte relgioöser Kommunikation in der Antike .
tremely valuable achievements of earlier performance - oriented ritual theory , the essays in this volume variously draw ... Uneasy with structuralist and formalistic approaches to ritual and culture , anthropologists like Turner ( 1969 ...