On the impossibility of invariant repetition: ritual,tradition and creativity among Sri Lankan ritual specialists

This article sets out to explore the strategic creativity that underlies supposedly invariant ritual performance. The ethnographic focus is on a group of Sri Lankan ritual specialists and the way they present the past in terms of mythical, historical and genealogical relationships that give power and legitimacy to their performances of healing rituals in the present. The analysis brings together local notions of “tradition” with ideas of performance and embodiment. The conclusion takes up the idea that, far from being the dead weight of tradition, invariance is a performative illusion of considerable ingenuity and persuasive power. Indeed, it is a fundamental means whereby the authority and power of ritual is maximized in performance.     

Making children,making chiefs: gender,power and ritual legitimacy

"This article explores indigenous notions of power and chiefly legitimacy among the Ihanzu, a relatively small Bantu-speaking community located in north central Tanzania. Particular attention is paid to local ideas and ideals of gender...in an effort to show the complex ways in which gender categories, when combined, are powerful and capable of effecting transformations of different sorts.... It is suggested that the strategic combination of the cultural categories ?male' and ?female' provides the underlying transformative model both for sexual reproduction and for rainmaking." (EXCERPT)     

Nation,narrative and commemoration: political ritual in divided Cyprus

This article examines the issue of political commemoration, focusing on the commemorations organized by different political parties in the two sides of divided Cyprus. It suggests a new analytical framework for the study of ritual in contemporary nation‐states that moves beyond the usual examination of any single ritual on its own terms. The use of comparison, both within each side and between the two sides, reveals how political actors stage commemorations of different historical events in order to propose contesting historical narratives. Hence, the meaning of any commemorative ritual can be understood only as part of the broader story that each narrative proposes. The historical narratives proposed by different political actors share certain common characteristics by virtue of all employing the narrative form: a beginning, a plot, certain categories of actors, the spatial location where history unfolds, the moral centre through which events are to be evaluated and the end. However, each narrative suggests a different story through which issues of identity and “otherness”, self‐justification and blame are negotiated in order to define the “imagined community” of the nation, its enemies and its pertinent history.     

Hyperstructure,hierarchy and humanitas in Olympic ritual

The Olympic victory ceremony is a globally familiar and highly stable ritual form of the world system of nation states. In this article, the medal ceremony is placed within the overarching Olympic ritual process, and its evocative power is attributed to its symbolic treatment of the relationship between Individual, National and Human identities in modern worlds. The ritual asserts and performs the compatibility of these identities in the face of all the horrific counter-evidence of the 20th century and today; it presents a very specific strategy for symbolically handling exclusionary nationalism.     

Food,faith and community: social well-being of Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands

This article explores how Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands enhance their gendered social well-being. We provide an in-depth view of gender-specific places and relations that shape the social well-being of migrants, focusing on place-based lived experiences, by conducting in-depth interviews and observations. Our results demonstrate that social well-being is enhanced by social networks, wherein the participants recreate feelings of self-esteem, belonging and recognition. Furthermore, the special meaning of food and faith also contributes to the social well-being of the participants. Food and faith serve as commemorations of traditions in their home country and alleviate the transition to new traditions in the host country. We also found that specific places, such as shops and churches, contribute to the social well-being of participants in the study. Men and women in our study use different strategies to construct their well-being, and they interpret places and social relations differently, but they all showed to be active agents in enhancing their social well-being. Our female participants in particular look for opportunities in the host country to independently enhance their social well-being, for instance through establishing their own small businesses and social groups. Through its focus on the social well-being of migrants, the study contributes to increase understanding between different cultural groups.     

Strontium isotope evidence of migration and diet in relation to ritual tooth ablation: a case study from the Inariyama Jomon site,Japan

Ritual tooth ablation was extensively practiced among Jomon (Japanese Neolithic) societies in their final phase (ca. 3000-2300 BP). This tradition includes two different tooth ablation patterns, type 4I and type 2C, referring to extraction of the mandibular incisors and canines, respectively. However, the reason for this difference is unclear. Previous carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of human remains from the Inariyama shell mound revealed that type 4I individuals were more dependent on terrestrial resources and type 2C individuals on marine resources. To test this hypothesis, we performed strontium (Sr) isotope (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) analyses on the same skeletal remains and on modern plants around the site. Because Sr isotope ratios of plants differ according to the local geology and seawater has a consistent Sr isotope ratio, the Sr isotope ratios of tooth enamel can reveal both migration and diet. Comparing Sr isotope ratios in plants and seawater with those of tooth enamel, we identified four possible immigrants. Type 4I locals had significantly higher Sr isotope ratios than type 2C locals. The ratios of the type 4I and type 2C locals were close to those of terrestrial plants and seawater, respectively, suggesting that type 4I locals had incorporated much Sr from terrestrial resources and type 2C locals from marine resources. These results support the hypothesis that ritual tooth ablation reflects dietary differences throughout an individual’s life, and they suggest possible occupational differentiation among the Jomon people.     

Rewriting the Latin liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre: text,ritual and devotion for 1149

ABSTRACT

An extraordinary reform of Jerusalem’s liturgy took place under the patriarchate of Fulcher of Angoulême (1146–57). The refocusing of Jerusalem’s rite positioned the commemoration of Easter as its central theological theme. This was effected to a level unparalleled in the liturgical traditions of the West. However, rubrics from extant twelfth-century liturgical books from Jerusalem further reveal how this reform was made to coincide with the 1149 rededication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the 50-year celebration of the capture of Jerusalem. From this newly discovered perspective, this study argues that liturgy, through its active rewriting, formed an integral part of a hitherto unexplored religious programme carried out by Patriarch Fulcher. Liturgy, alongside architecture and civic festivities, was used as a central tool to reshape the devotional identity of Jerusalem and the Latin East.     

Finding likeness: Neural plasticity and ritual experience

To efficiently survive, living creatures require some means of recording their experiences, predicting future experiences on the firm basis of such recordings and deciding on actions that help survival and reproduction. For us humans, this is provided by our very large brains. Our brains are adaptable; indeed, we never use the same brain twice. There are two main mechanisms: reversible synaptic plasticity and the irreversible myelination of axons. Culture can be seen as the store of world knowledge, tacit and explicit, that individuals must acquire to facilitate decision-making by defining their range of options and to become acceptable social persons. Such knowledge is encoded, in ways not yet fully understood, in the pattern of our brain’s connections. In rites of passage, one’s social identity is transformed, entailing a significant modification of this pattern. Liminal status, brought about by entrainment with the ritual’s powerfully affective actions, appears to remove the cultural feedbacks that maintained one’s former social identity and enables durable modification to brain connections by means of a greater myelination of existing pathways and myelination of previously unused pathways. Such changes might be empirically observable using non-invasive MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) techniques. The shared intense experience during the liminal period encourages a sense of likeness among participants, which is embedded in their brains by shared patterns of durable connections.     

A cultural proxy for drought: ritual burning in the Iron age of Southern Africa

In traditional Bantu-speaking societies in southern Africa, drought is caused by breaches in rules of pollution. At times of severe drought (3–5 consecutive seasons), rainmakers ascend special hills to perform special rituals. The archaeological signature of this unique activity forms a cultural proxy for drought. New research shows that burnt daga structures also correlate with high δ¹⁵N values for small stock. Burnt structures thus form a new component to the proxy. According to the ethnography, farmers implicated in the cause burnt their grain bins, and sometimes houses, as a ritual of cleansing. The dating of these structures provides a revised climatic sequence for the plateau portion of the summer rainfall region. Among other new results, there was a drought at the end of the Mapungubwe period (ca. AD 1300). At about AD 1650, droughts associated with the arrival of maize caused people to stop growing it as food for a while.     

Mississippian religious beliefs and ritual practice: Earthen monuments,rock art,and sacred shrines

Abstract

The five books under review here explicitly call for archaeologists to place greater emphasis on agency and practice in understanding the role of religion and ritual in the ancient world. Four volumes, principally investigating Mississippian polities, draw our attention to the American midcontinent and its earthen monuments, magical plants, rock art, sacra, and sacred shrines. Although spanning a diversity of approaches and perspectives, the authors demonstrate how cosmograms, exotic objects, sacred landscapes, and transcendental beings articulate with people’s daily lives and lived experiences. Each work offers an awareness of religion as expressed through materiality and the ways past belief systems were bundled, constituted, entangled, and intermeshed with agentive things, built landscapes, humans, natural environments, and other-than-human-persons. The fifth book, by Brian Hayden, contributes a significant approach to these ongoing discussions by stressing the importance of secret societies for interpreting and understanding the power of ritual in the ancient world.