Designs of Ritual: The City Dionysia of Fifth-Century Athens (original) (raw)

In, Celebrations: Sanctuaries and the Vestiges of Cult Activity, ed. M. Wedde, Athens: Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens, Vol. 6, pp 207-235, 2004

Don Handelman THE STUDY OF RITUAL must address the meta-level of designs through which particular rituals are organized. Rituals are schemes of practice and action that are designed culturally to accomplish a variety of purposes less easily done through other means. Designs of ritual organize the practice of ritual into coherent and continuous patterns. Without design, ritual structures and processes could not exist. The idea of design itself depends on logic. I am not referring to the logic of logic of philosophy and mathematics, but rather to the logics of phenomena. The logics of phenomena refer here to the principled ways in which certain social phenomena are intentionally ordered and disordered as practice (and practiced as ordering and disordering). A given ritual is activated, first and foremost, by the practice of its logic(s) of organizational design. In this work I will be concerned primarily with the design that I call modelling; though some mention will also be made of the design of presentation (I have discussed these in detail in Handelman 1998). 2 MY focus here is on rituals that are designed culturally to change the world outside these events some way. This is a key issue in ritual studies since it implies that ritual must have a special ontological status in the world that enables ritual to act on that world. In the case of rituals that model, that impact on the world outside themselves, their ontological status is to be designed as worlds unto themselves.

Ritual as Action and Symbolic Expression

In E Østrem, MB Bruun, NH Petersen & J Fleischer (eds), Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, pp. 49-64., 2005

Understanding Rituals: A Critique of Representationalism

The explanations of ritual practices observed in archaeological contexts often proceed on the representationalist basis that the human mind contains the social constituted ideas or representations that underpin the practice of rituals. Such a view remains widespread and, despite the often proclaimed rejection in contemporary theory of the Cartesian mind-body and other dualisms, it perpetuates the Enlightenment representationalist heritage according to which mental contents represent social reality and, as such, drive ritual practices and human action more generally. This article illustrates the meaning and value of rejecting such a representationalist view of human (ritual) action in favour of what we call an institutional view. In such a view, a ritual can be conceived as a form of recurring activity involving temporally and geographically dispersed actors active in differing roles and hence also with differing interests and levels of knowledge of the ritual and the associated belief system.

Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual

uni-heidelberg.de

Bibliografi sche Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografi e; detaillierte bibliografi sche Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografi e; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Introduction: Why Ritual in its Own Right? How So?

Social Analysis, 48, no. 2: 1-32, 2004

Calvin, who introduces this collection of essays on ritual in its own right, understands ritual as well as many anthropologists. Calvin is dramatizing thematics that I am trying to avoid. Complaining about the peanut butter, spoiled because his mother did not observe the proper ritual for scooping it out, he is telling us: do the ritual correctly. It exists because it has a function-control. Perform control in your ritual, and you will have control in your life. The ritual of how to scoop out peanut butter is a representation of life. Living produces its own symbols, its own reflections, and these are the ritual, existing to enact themes of living-here that of control. The ritual has meaning, otherwise why the argument

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