Suchergebnisse

I shall argue that most religious ritual is a performance that not only invokes but also performs communication. The ethnographic material from which I derive this argument is from China, in particular the temple rituals of local festivals. My argument is that a deep obeisance of welcome and departure that is both like and not like the normal ritual of greeting marks a religious from a non‐religious ritual occasion and place. It is a ritual doubling that makes the honoured guest also a host. Religious ritual is a medium, and as a medium it is double in another sense. It is deference and deferral, a repeated transmission of obeisance to authority that has the authority of repetition. As well as doubling, religious ritual is excessively communicative. The medium is a performance not only of invitation and departure but also of communicative response, and it repeats this communication as a test of communicative response over and over again. Religious ritual performs both the opening and closing of communication, both the seeking and the responsive reciprocation of gift offerings with bounteousness. It is shadowed by the possibility of no response, of giving offence, of being abandoned. This possibility is acknowledged by being prevented, while the possibility that the performers are their own responders is disavowed.

"Anhand dreier Fallbeispiele von Familien jüdisch-gemischter Herkunft wird untersucht, wie diese verhandelt wird, um eine Familieneinheit zu schaffen sowie die Brüche der Vergangenheit, insbesondere die Gewalterfahrungen im 'Dritten Reich', in die verschiedenen Stränge der Familienteile zu integrieren. Dabei zeigt sich, dass nicht nur das 'soziale Sein' der Familien sehr unterschiedlich ist, sondern genauso ihre Vorstellungen vom 'Jüdischsein'. Alle nutzen die Möglichkeiten der Textproduktion, von Film und Radio, doch sind nicht alle Erinnerungen für die Öffentlichkeit bestimmt; in der Anlage von privaten Archive werden die für die Familie relevanten Bezüge gesammelt, der Sinn für Verortung und Zugehörigkeit gepflegt. Alle können daher den anderen eine alternative 'Geschichte' anbieten." (Autorenreferat)

Religion is profuse in Taiwan, and this is reflected in publications. In the last chapter of this collection, Randall Nadeau and Chang Hsun point out that Taiwanese academic publications on religion in Taiwan have increased hugely in the last two decades. Taiwanese anthropologists have probably been most prominent in this study. But this book contains only one chapter by an anthropologist writing as such. He is Huang Shiu-wey. Typical of an old anthropological habit, now that Chinese, according to Nadeau and Chang, are more studied than aboriginal inhabitants (yuanzhumin) by Taiwanese anthropologists, Huang's chapter is on the Ami. It stands awkwardly among the others, which are by historians and teachers in religious studies departments, with its use of anthropological concepts of culture and identity and its concentration on ritual and avoidance of a discrete concept of religion. One other chapter is about "religious culture." It is by Julian Pas, the justly renowned editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, who died before he could polish his chapter. The book is dedicated to him. But honouring his efforts to enrich the study of religion in China and Taiwan and sympathy for his state of health at the time will not prevent a reader from noticing how short and thin his chapter is, precisely because he misses so much that anthropologists have written. The book as a whole shares this failing. The introduction does not make the conceptual and informative links to provide a social analysis of the remarkable cultural and religious changes that each chapter describes within its own narrow remit. The editors simply state that religion is dynamic, that modernization includes the fact that traditions change, and that the aim of the book is to chart those changes. They introduce each chapter without linking it to the others.