Narrating Human Monsters and Mythical Space among Athapascan-speaking Peoples of North-west Canada. (original) (raw)

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

Questioning cognitivist AND interpretivist takes on ritual

Is 'nature' the only basis we have for explaining universal patterns in culture, such as religious practices? Cognitive and interpretive approaches seem to agree so in surprisingly Cartesian fashion. This paper proposes cosmologies as a second, 'cultural' type of universality. For an ethnographer affected by the field, culture is not something out there to either 'explain' (Sperber, Lévi-Strauss) or 'interpret' (Geertz, Weber). Culture is to be comprehended by 'getting into' a variety of shared cosmological states. These cosmological states are (1) reflexive, (2) exhaustive and (3) mutually exclusive categories, which can account for (4) the semantic shifts characterizing practices such as rituals. These four conditions are lacking in the binary mechanisms of cognitive modules of the Standard Model of religion (e.g. Boyer and Liénard's hazard-precaution) and the epidemiological model (Sperber and Bloch).

Ritual Metaphysics

… Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives. New York …, 2004

In this paper, I seek to show the fruitfulness of connecting the study of ritual activities to the ritualists's metaphysics, which is to say, to their understanding of the necessary conditions of life. I suggest that some rituals may be seen as inscribing bodies with messages that are, properly speaking, metaphysical in this sense, and that some rituals may be seen as embodied inquiries into the metaphysical nature of things. By so doing, I hope to provide conceptual tools for those who see rituals as having a cosmic dimension, and thereby to improve the generally weak relationship between the study of rituals and philosophy.

The Symbolism in Rituals; the Function of the Mind (under cultural perspectives)

At the following paper I am going to discuss about the creation of symbols and about the role and the symbolism of the body in rituals and generally in human societies. It is generally known that the members of human societies communicate with each other with symbols that are formed in proportion with the cultural environment in which they live and stay. Definitely the creation and definition of symbols does not mean a procedure that can accept changes, but it composes a continuous movement, negotiation in public and private field that takes a lot of different forms according to the cultural and historical environment 2 .

Evoked culture, ritualization and religious rituals

This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Lie´nardLie´nard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 'Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action-parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals' and in another article published in the American Anthropologist, 'Whence collective rituals? A cultural selection model of ritualized behavior'. The two theories Cultural rituals present vexing problems for psychology and anthropology. Why are these forms of human behavior so ubiquitous? Even more enigmatic are religious rituals. In fact, are there such things as religious rituals? If so, what are they? Lawson and McCauley (1990) define religious rituals as cultural rituals in which social agents with special qualities play prominent roles. These agents are regarded as special because of some purported 'connection' to postulated supernatural entities such as gods, spirits, ancestors and the like. 1 (P. Lie´nardLie´nard), t.lawson@qub.ac.uk (E.T. Lawson).. 1 For a thorough analysis of the notion of counterintuitiveness and its relationship to superhuman beings, see Pyysiaïnen (2001). 0048-721X/$-see front matter Ó

The Archetypal Actions of Ritual

2008

Can a theory be extrapolated based solely on a single ethnographic study? Can the examination of a single form of ritual suffice to create a blanket research method which is applicable to all forms of ritual? Is meaning merely a construct which participants lull themselves into believing that ritual possesses? And does intentionality have an effect on the consideration of meaning within ritual? I will attempt to elucidate several aspects of the responses to these questions within the context of James Laidlaw and Caroline Humphrey’s work, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. I will also comment upon and demonstrate the difficulties inherent in the creation of the authors’ model of ritual theory.