The Problem of Ritual Efficacy PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Problem of Ritual Efficacy PDF full book. Access full book title The Problem of Ritual Efficacy by William Sax. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: William Sax
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199742363
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book
Book Description
How do rituals work? Although this is one of the first questions that people everywhere ask about rituals, little has been written explicitly on the topic. In The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, nine scholars address this issue, ranging across the fields of history, anthropology, medicine, and biblical studies. For "modern" people, the very notion of ritual efficacy is suspicious because rituals are widely thought of as merely symbolic or expressive, so that - by definition - they cannot be efficacious. Nevertheless people in many cultures assume that rituals do indeed "work," and when we take a closer look at who makes claims for ritual efficacy (and who disputes such claims), we learn a great deal about the social and historical contexts of such debates. Moving from the pre-modern era-in which the notion of ritual efficacy was not particularly controversial-into the skeptical present, the authors address a set of debates between positivists, natural scientists, and religious skeptics on the one side, and interpretive social scientists, phenomenologists, and religious believers on the other. Some contributors advance a particular theory of ritual efficacy while others ask whether the question makes any sense at all. This path-breaking interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to readers in anthropology, history, religious studies, humanities and the social sciences broadly defined, and makes an important contribution to the larger conversation about what ritual does and why it matters to think about such things.
Author: William Sax
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199742363
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book
Book Description
How do rituals work? Although this is one of the first questions that people everywhere ask about rituals, little has been written explicitly on the topic. In The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, nine scholars address this issue, ranging across the fields of history, anthropology, medicine, and biblical studies. For "modern" people, the very notion of ritual efficacy is suspicious because rituals are widely thought of as merely symbolic or expressive, so that - by definition - they cannot be efficacious. Nevertheless people in many cultures assume that rituals do indeed "work," and when we take a closer look at who makes claims for ritual efficacy (and who disputes such claims), we learn a great deal about the social and historical contexts of such debates. Moving from the pre-modern era-in which the notion of ritual efficacy was not particularly controversial-into the skeptical present, the authors address a set of debates between positivists, natural scientists, and religious skeptics on the one side, and interpretive social scientists, phenomenologists, and religious believers on the other. Some contributors advance a particular theory of ritual efficacy while others ask whether the question makes any sense at all. This path-breaking interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to readers in anthropology, history, religious studies, humanities and the social sciences broadly defined, and makes an important contribution to the larger conversation about what ritual does and why it matters to think about such things.
Author: William Sturman Sax
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199852680
Category : Ritual
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book
Book Description
This collection of ten contributed essays explicitly addresses the question of ritual efficacy. The authors do not aspire to answer the question 'how do rituals work?' in a simplistic fashion, but rather to show how complex the question is.
Author: Michael David Kaulana Ing
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199924910
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book
Book Description
Michael Ing's The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. Ing uses his analysis of the Liji to show how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure.
Author: Barry Stephenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199943591
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book
Book Description
Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199760381
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book
Book Description
Ritual studies today figures as a central element of religious discourse for many scholars around the world. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell's sweeping and seminal work on the subject, helped legitimize the field. In this volume, Bell re-examines the issues, methods, and ramifications of our interest in ritual by concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Now with a new foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace, Bell's work is a must-read for understanding the evolution of the field of ritual studies and its current state.
Author: Camille Wingo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781594609732
Category : Psychology, Religious
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
One question which yet bedevils the study of ritual is this: "How are rituals ever efficacious?" Or, put another way, "How is anyone ever persuaded that a ritual does or makes what it claims to do or make?" This book addresses the question by proposing a cognitive model for ritual as information processors (participants) instantiating information processes (rituals). Ritual participants use cognitive technologies to create cultural objects. A cognitive technology is a change we make in the environment to bolster our native cognitive skills; shopping lists are cognitive technologies to bolster memory. A cultural object is a thing in the world that is what it is by virtue of the combination of what it is physically and a culture's agreement on what it is; biscuits in the U.K. and cookies in the U.S. are cultural objects. Rituals, the book proposes, are effective inasmuch as they make or manipulate cultural objects. Pictures Making Beliefs expands its proposal by comparing rituals to kindred cultural technologies: pictures and make-believe. The premise is that the study of ritual as cognition can be expanded, enlightened and improved by the use of concepts and methods prevalent in investigations of the cognitive underpinnings of these kindred cultural achievements. From these comparisons emerges the idea of worlds as a quasi-technical explanation of pictures, make-believe, the here and now and rituals as information streams flowing through body, brain and environment. Finally, the book situates the cognitive technological model within the wider landscape of religious studies by placing it within a chain of correlations from lower level descriptions (e.g. in neuro-science) to the higher levels (e.g. in sociology) by presenting the objects created and manipulated in ritual as essentially contested. The claim is that, in the performance of rituals, participants structure the world in ways to create boundless and obscure objects whose proper function in the world outside their ritual relies upon their being, in their essence, contestable. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "The author writes in a skillful and fluid style, and the book is remarkably accessible given its level of technical and scholarly information. This is not a book about debunking religious faith; it attempts to explain how rituals work, not why they do. Its goal is to describe how people's minds operate on levels from neurobiology to group social behavior. The book is interesting, unusual, strongly researched, and well written." -- Book News, Inc. (December 2012)
Author: David J. Mozina
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824883411
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book
Book Description
In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, David J. Mozina invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in today’s south China. He shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Written for students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion, Knotting the Banner will also appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.
Author: Tore Ahlbäck
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Rites and ceremonies
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book
Book Description
Collection of papers on ritualistics in religion, including the study of shamans in various cultures, the Norse myths and Scandinavian rituals.
Author: William S Sax
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195335864
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Get Book
Book Description
In God of Justice, anthropologist William S. Sax offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of cursing, black magic, and ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of North India. Based on ten years' ethnographic fieldwork, God of Justice shows how these practices are part of a moral system based on the principle of family unity.
Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195301420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book
Book Description
Readership: Students and scholars of ritual studies, religious studies, anthropology
