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Ritual Practice (ritual + practice)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Sitting in Silence: Self, Emotion, and Tradition in the Genesis of a Charismatic Ministry

ETHOS, Issue 4 2001
Assistant Professor Albert Schrauwers
David Willson was the charismatic leader of a small Utopian Quaker sect, the Children of Peace (1812,89), who prophesied a millenarian transformation of the British empire. This article examines the confluence of social forces and historical conditions that made this charismatic ministry possible. Following Csordas, the emphasis is placed on the means by which followership is created, rather than on the personality of the leader. I argue that Willson's charismatic leadership was predicated upon inculcating a distinctive habitus, on shaping and molding cultural conceptions of self and of emotion, which create the distinctive disposition to obey infollowers. A "theology of mind" was critical to Willson's ministry, and the culturally and historically distinctive emotions and dispositions it described were inculcated in the communal ritual practice of "sitting in silence." [source]

The orthodoxization of ritual practice in western Anatolia

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2009
KIMBERLY HART
ABSTRACT In rural western Turkey, villagers have replaced male performances of davul (bass drum) and zurna (double-reed wind instrument) as well as men's dancing with mevluts, special prayer services, and they have replaced women's dances to taped or live electric harmonium music with sohbets, sermons. Villagers are motivated to transform "cultural practices" that appear "backward" from the perspective of state-based ideologies of cultural progress and that are considered sinful from the perspective of Islamists. I trace their quests for spiritual and secular salvation and how they relate to the construction of a modernist Islamic worldview. [source]

Becoming a Christian in Fiji: an ethnographic study of ontogeny

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2004
Christina Toren
By means of an ethnographic and developmental analysis, this article shows how everyday ritual practice is fundamental to people's constitution over time of ideas that, in this case, inform a specifically Fijian Christianity. Focusing on the developmental process that is the fixation of belief, and on the significance of ritual for this process, it explores transformations in ideas about God, Sunday school, and death ceremonies held by Sawaieke girls and boys between 7 years, 10 months and 13 years old. The broader objective is to demonstrate, first, how data obtained systematically from children can illuminate our understanding of ritual and its significance, and, secondly, how an analysis of the developmental process necessarily entails a concomitant analysis of the social relations that inform it. [source]

Widowhood practices in West Africa: the silent victims

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 3 2002
Antoinette Sossou, Marie
This article discusses the plight and suffering of widows in terms of their social, economic, psychological and human rights violations in three West African societies. The article describes the situation of the widows as silent victims who suffer cruel and dehumanising cultural and ritual practices as a mourning process for their dead spouses. The article also examines the gender inequalities suffered by the widows and makes some recommendations as to how these practices could be minimised or eliminated from those societies. [source]

On Spiritual Edgework: The Logic of Extreme Ritual Performances

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2007
DAVID G. BROMLEY
Religion as a social form is constructed to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment and control. Rituals that involve a risk of physical or psychological injury or even death therefore would appear anomalous and indeed are frequently the objects of social scientific and journalistic denigration. Firewalking and serpent handling exemplify such rituals. I argue that these two radical ritual practices, which I term spiritual edgework, provide a valuable sociological window on how radical ritual practices are socially constructed. The social construction process involves the identification of a mythically relevant edge that offers: both contingency and certainty; individual and collective preparation for the impending edgework during which tensions are elevated for later ritual resolution; a ritualized process for successfully navigating the edge; and postedgework accounts that neutralize potential disconfirming injuries or deaths. [source]

Vajra Brother, Vajra Sister: Renunciation, Individualism and the Household in Tibetan Buddhist Monasticism

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2000
Martin A. Mills
This article challenges two connected notions in the study of Tibetan Buddhism: that Buddhist monasticism is characterized by a pronounced move towards individualism, systematically detaching monks from relational social life; and that Tibetan Buddhist doctrines of karma represent an alternative mode of identity to those constructed within household life. By comparing the ritual practices and inheritance patterns associated with household groups in Ladakh with tantric ritual forms in local Buddhist (Gelukpa) monasteries, it is argued that they demonstrate pronounced structural similarities, centred on the shared symbolic construct of the household/temple as the source of socialized agency. An analysis of the meditative disciplines of Gelukpa monasticism is used to show how such training serves not to renounce kinship and household values, but to transform them into modes of religious authority, essential to the social position of monks (trapa) and incarnate lamas (tulku) in Tibetan Buddhism. [source]