The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in a Japanese Community

The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in. Japanese Community. Scott Schnell. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. 363 pp.     

Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction

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

Webs of Legitimacy and Discredit: Narrative Capital and Politics of Ritual in a Timor-Leste Community

This article explores the interconnections among origin narratives, migration patterns and ritual authority in a Timor-Leste community. By recognising the dimension of rituals as sources of power, we analyse the different ways social actors negotiate their position in social space by either supporting or contesting the legitimacy of the ritual leaders. We suggest how, in a context with historical levels of high migration and immersed in rapid social change, precedence is not only challenged by modern ideals around individual rights and choices, but by the re-interpretation of mythical narratives and the access to ritual performance. The paper provides a discussion of the notion of narrative capital and shows how subordinated classes resulting from development policies from past state regimes articulate new forms of social mobility in the contemporary context of rural Timor-Leste.     

From "Rights" to "Ritual": AIDS Activism in South Africa

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement.     

Building the Infrastructure, Modeling the Nation: The Case of Birth in Palestine

This article explores the intersection between the professional politics of medicine and national politics during the second Palestinian uprising, which erupted in 2000. Through an analysis of stories about childbirth from actors in the birth process--obstetricians, midwives and birth mothers--it examines two overlapping movements that contributed to building the public health infrastructure, the movement of sumud or steadfastness (1967-87) and the popular health movement (1978-94), as well as their contemporary afterlife. Finally, it deals with relations between medicine and governance through an analysis of the interpenetration of medical and political authority. The birth stories bring to light two contrasting visions of a nation in the context of restrictions on mobility and a ground chopped up by checkpoints. The quasi-postcolonial condition of Palestine as popular construct, institutional protostate organism, and the lived experience of its experts and of its gendered subjects underlie the ethnographic accounts.     

In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice

Based on ethnographic work among North American occupational therapists, I compare two forms of everyday clinical talk. One, 'chart talk," conforms to normative conceptions of clinical rationality. The second, storytelling, permeates clinical discussions but has no formal status as a vehicle for clinical reasoning. I argue that both modes of discourse provide avenues for reasoning about clinical problems. However, these discourses construct very different clinical objects and different phenomena to reason about. Further, the clinical problems created through storytelling point toward a more radically distinct conception of rationality than the one underlying biomedicine as it is formally conceived. Clinical storytelling is more usefully understood as a mode of Aristotle's "practical rationality" than the technical rationality of modern (enlightenment) conceptions of reasoning, [narrative, practical reasoning, clinical reasoning, ethics]     

Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away: Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual"

Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between individuals, and ritual serves uniquely to reaffirm this mutuality at the level of both individual behavior and conventional meaning. Through a study of male greetings among olive baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis), this paper illustrates how ritual in Rappaport's sense may indeed intensify cooperation in socially complex but nonlinguistic contexts by establishing a behaviorally transparent means of certifying otherwise opaque individual intentions. Thus, not only may ritual sanctify symbolic communication, but it also may have played a crucial role in its evolution, [ritual, sociocultural evolution, religion and society, symbolic communication, olive baboons, primate social behavior]     

Behind the Statistics: The Ethnography of Suicide in Palestine

As part of the first anthropological study on suicide in the modern Arab world, statistics gathered from the Ramallah region of the West Bank in Palestine painted an apparently remarkably similar picture to that found in Western countries such as the UK and France. More men than women completed suicide, more women than men attempted suicide. Men used more violent methods such as hanging and women softer methods such as medication overdose. Completed suicide was higher in the older age range, attempted suicide in the younger. However, ethnographic fieldwork and detailed examination of the case studies and suicide narratives gathered and analysed within the cultural, political and economic contexts illustrated more starkly the differences in suicidal practices between Palestinian West Bank society of the 1990s and other regions of the world. The central argument of the paper is that although statistics tell a very important story, ethnography uncovers a multitude of stories 'behind the statistics', and thus helps us to make sense of both cultural context and subjective experience.     

The Sociodrama of Presidential Politics: Rhetoric, Ritual, and Power in the Era of Teledemocracy

In this paper I examine the American presidential campaign cycle as a series of ritualized sociodramas. Examples are used from the campaigns of 1988, 1992, and 1996 to illustrate the role of ritual, rhetoric, symbol, and media in the process of presidential power acquisition. These political processes are analyzed utilizing the concepts of sociodrama and rituals of rebellion extant in the literature of political anthropology. Specific cases such as the bus tours of the Clinton campaign, the Willie Horton commercials of the Bush campaign, and the case of Murphy Brown are examined in detail. The goal of the paper is to render an anthropological perspective on the process of choosing the American President in the era of teledemocracy. [American presidential campaign, ritual, rhetoric, symbol, media]     

How Visual Figures Speak: Narrative Inventions of "The Pastoralist" in East Africa

Through their media images, pastoralists have become "icons" of African traditionalism and unwitting symbols of resistance to the modernist values of development and conservation. Their pictorial fame bears political costs. Popular visual images convey tacit narrative presuppositions that shape public (mis)understanding of pastoral communities, as tacitly pejorative images of pastoralists--most notably of Maasai--proliferate in film, tourist brochures, and advertising, at a time when pastoral communities are faced with political marginalization and dispossession. This article examines the narratives implicit in ethnographic images of pastoralists, images that support the "fulfillment" of pastoral "characters" through policies detrimental to their future.     

The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, Gender, and the Currency of Knowledge

The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: Kinship, Gender, and the Currency of Knowledge. Françoise Dussart. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. 269 pp.     

Ethnicity and Shared Meanings: A Case Study of the "Orphaned Bones" Ritual in Mainland China and Overseas

ABSTRACT   Several theories of ethnicity emphasize the analysis of intergroup relations. They neglect, however, the conflation of ideas and values structuring these relations—notably the cross-cultural aggregates of shared cultural meanings that underlie forms of cooperation and competition between interacting groups. In this article, I explore this kind of process through a multisite ethnography of the Xiu gugu ("refining of orphaned bones"), a ritual that the Chaozhou people of northeast Guangdong province, an ethnic subgroup of the Han, perform periodically. The celebration of this rite in Chaozhou is compared to versions resulting of the ritual in Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist contexts. In the latter case, close conceptions of malevolent death underlie a fascinating interethnic cooperation, with most of the unfortunate dead whose bones are "refined" during the Chaozhou ritual being Thai.     

Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement

Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of. Religious Movement. Thomas J. Csordas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.320 pp.     

Ritual, Risk, and Danger: Chain Prayers in Fiji

Rituals that defuse immediate senses of danger can perpetuate senses of powerlessness. Ambiguous language used in defensive rituals can heighten people's senses of the risks they are confronting and also compel people to perform those rituals again in the future. In this article, I illustrate this argument by examining Fijian Methodist masu sema (chain prayers), which are conducted to defuse the dangers that beset society, including curses from demonic ancestors. I argue that Fijian cultural themes of present-day human powerlessness are generated largely by competition between Methodist and chiefly authorities. "Chain prayers" are attempts to negate the power of dangerous ancestors, but in requesting God's help, ritual participants cast themselves as powerless. Verbal ambiguity in chain prayers gives "demons" lives of their own, compelling their future circulation.