Rite out of Place Ritual, Media, and the Arts

by Grimes, Ronald L.

• ISBN13: 9780195301441
• ISBN10: 0195301447
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. Rite Out of Place collects 10 revised essays originally published in widely varied sources across the past five years. Grimes has selected for inclusion those essays that track ritual as it haunts the edges of cultural boundaries-ritual converging with theater, ritual on television, ritual at the edge of natural environments and so on. The writing is non-technical, and the implied audience is sufficiently broad than any educated person interested in religion and public life should find it intelligible and engaging.

Author Biography

Ronald L. Grimes holds the Chair of Ritual Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Deeply into the Bone, Readings in Ritual Studies, and several other books on ritual. Grimes is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.

Table of Contents

Part I: Ritual in Mediated Space
Ritual and the Media	3	(12)
Documenting Ritual	15	(12)
Shooting Rites	27	(12)
Fiddling with Fiddler	39	(22)
Part II: Ritual in Classroom and Conceptual Space
Ritual in the Classroom	61	(12)
Ritualizing September 11	73	(14)
Sequestering Sacred Space	87	(14)
Putting Space in Its Place	101	(16)
Part III: Ritual in Environmental Space
The Barn and the Lab	117	(14)
Ritual Theory and the Environment	131	(16)
Performance Is Currency	147	(14)
Notes	161	(18)
Sources Cited	179	(8)
Index	187