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...

Beginnings in Ritual Studies lays the groundwork for the interdisciplinary study of ritual by broadening the conception of it and articulating its connections to a wide range of cultural activities. Accessible to scholars and students, Beginnings addresses such fundamental issues as definitions, types, and theories of ritual. The volume integrates field research and theory in considering ritual's relation to religious, civil, medical, and theatrical dimensions of culture. The first and second editions garnered widespread praise from the scholarly community and became a standard work in the...

Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in...

Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in...

Significant life passages are marked by ritual in virtually every culture. Weddings and funerals are only two of the most obvious ones. A wide variety of rites, both traditional and invented, also mark birth and coming of age. However, many major transitions remain unmarked. Marrying & Burying tells an intensely personal story about the role of ritual in Ron Grimes's own rich and sometimes difficult life. His critique of ritual impoverishment in North America reveals the extraordinary potential that ritualizing holds for negotiating and enriching transitions, both exalted and mundane. Always...

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to a topic seldom written about: the evaluation of rites. Enacting ritual and thinking critically are often imagined as mutually exclusive activities, but Ritual Criticism demonstrates their complementarity by presenting case studies in which ritual and criticism require one another. The cases are drawn from contemporary, urban, North American social contexts in which specific rites are undergoing evaluation, interpretation, or revision. The cases eventuate in essays, more theoretical treatments of critical issues in ritual studies. The rituals...

Fictive Ritual explores the ritual dimensions of literary fiction, drama, and autobiography. Among the works it considers are Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show, Elie Wiesel's Gates of the Forest, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Words, Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro, and Soren Kierkegaard's Repetition."

Symbol and Conquest makes a number of innovative analytical distinctions which Professor Grimes interweaves skillfully with his descriptions of the rituals and symbols of the two dominant public celebrations in modern Santa Fe. This New Mexican city is an especially appropriate subject for the study of symbolic action in a contemporary setting. Santa Fe not only has inherited a rich store of icons, emblems, and insignia from its dramatic past and an arena of conflict and alliance between "Hispanic," "Anglo," and "Indo" peoples and cultures, but also has generated new "signifiers." In addition...

In religious studies, theory and method research has long been embroiled in a polarized debate over scientific versus theological perspectives. Ronald L. Grimes shows that this debate has stagnated, due in part to a manner of theorizing too far removed from the study of actual religious practices. A worthwhile theory, according to Grimes, must be practice-oriented, and practices are most effectively studied by field research methods.

The Craft of Ritual Studies melds together a systematic theory and method capable of underwriting the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of...

In religious studies, theory and method research has long been embroiled in a polarized debate over scientific versus theological perspectives. Ronald L. Grimes shows that this debate has stagnated, due in part to a manner of theorizing too far removed from the study of actual religious practices. A worthwhile theory, according to Grimes, must be practice-oriented, and practices are most effectively studied by field research methods.

The Craft of Ritual Studies melds together a systematic theory and method capable of underwriting the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of...