Synopses & Reviews
The word ritual often evokes images of outward social performances, whether austere physical gestures or exuberant pageants of song and dance. In Ritualization and Human Interiority, Clemens Cavallin examines the inward meaning of rituals, showing that ritual and many forms of interiorization are in fact interconnected processes providing ritual practices with a particular basic dynamism. Tying this notion into related topics, such as ritualization and modernity, Cavallin provides new insights into one of the human sciences’ central questions: the relationship between external social displays and internal personal acts.
Review
"This is an exceptionally fine book - certainly the most important work on ritual I have read in a decade."--istory of Religions
Review
"The volume is stimulating and merits reflection..."--
The Journal of ReligionSynopsis
Humphrey and Laidlaw present a new and radical general theory of ritual by drawing on an ethnographically rich account of the ritual worship of the Jains of western India. Ritual, they argue, is not a logically separate type of activity, but rather a quality that can be attributed to a wide range of everyday activities. In exploring the issue of what is distinctive about actions which are ritualized, this book makes an ambitious and controversial contribution to social and religious anthropology.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-288) and index.
About the Author
Clemens Cavallin is senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abstract
Introduction
Some methodological remarks
Chapter 1: Ritualization
Abstract action
Ritualization and discourse
Ritual action semiotics
Chapter 2: Interiorization
Internalization and externalization
Spiritualization and materialization
Interiorization of ritual efficacy
The metaphorical nature of interiority
Interiorization of ritual performance
Interiorization of ritual effects
Divine interiority
Chapter 3: The Interaction of Interiorization and Ritualization
Exteriorization – Interiorization
Internalization
Deritualization
Chapter 4: Modernity and Deritualization
Nominalism
Interiorization in a wider sense
Bibliography
Index