Search results

Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction. Barbara Y. Butler. and D. Troy Case, eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005. 807 pp.

This book provides a ground-breaking, interaction-based framework of rituals, drawing on multiple research disciplines. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through pre-existing patterns and captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing interactants' behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts

Este libro reconstruye críticamente la memoria argumental de cinco teorías antropológicas del ritual, y con ella traza tanto una parte significativa de la historia de la antropología simbólica como los mecanismos bajo los cuales se han producido los saberes antropológicos de la alteridad. Además ofrece propuestas de interés en los debates actuales para la comprensión de la vida ritual. [Texto de la editorial]

This special section of Museum Worlds explores the entire process of repatriation as a set of rituals enacted by claimants and museum staff: a set of highlighted performances enacting multiple sets of cosmological beliefs, symbolic systems, and political structures. Some of the rituals of repatriation occur within the space of Indigenous ceremonies; others happen within the museum spaces of collections storage and the boardroom; others, such as handover ceremonies, are coproduced and culturally hybrid. From the often obsessive bureaucracy associated with repatriation claims to the affective moment of handover, repatriation articulates a moral landscape where memory, responsibility, guilt, identity, sanctity, place, and ownership are given a ritual form. Theory about ritual is used here to situate the articles in this section, which together form a cross-cultural examination of ritual meaning and form across repatriation processes.

Klappentext: In diesem Buch wird der Ritualbegriff aus der Perspektive verschiedener Disziplinen und im Kontext gegenwärtiger erziehungs-, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Problematisierungen diskutiert.

This research focuses on the use of guanxi (Chinese personal connections) in everyday urban life. Although there is much research focused on guanxi, little is known about the specific tactics of developing and using guanxi in Chinese urban society. The study presented here aims to fill this gap. Data was drawn from two ethnographic studies of school place allocation in two Chinese cities during 2012 and 2013. The research finds that ritual is vital in all forms of la guanxi (instrumental guanxi practice) and that ritual exists at almost every stage of this process. The practice of ritual becomes an important way of using and developing one's guanxi capital, and "instrumental li" is the shared value behind ritual practice in guanxi. Based on this finding, a new concept called "ritual capital" is proposed. This refers to a part of an individual's social capital that is mainly established and maintained by the practice of proper ritual; namely, the ability to use ritual for resources or benefits.