About
This site, created and maintained by Ron Grimes and Barry Stephenson, is designed to facilitate interaction among students of ritual from around the world. Its purpose is to enhance research and teaching about ritual in the global ritual studies community. E-mail addressed to webmaster@ritualstudies.com will reach both of us.
How This Site Works
A post is discussion-starter, since it can be followed by comments. A post can contain words, pictures, picture galleries, videos, and recorded sounds such as music. A post can also link to or embed content on other web sites.
Discussions can be open, invited, or private. In an open discussion, an author simply makes a post thereby implicitly inviting comments from anyone. In an invited discussion an author or webmaster invites specific people into the discussion although others may, if they wish, join. In a private discussion, an author requests from the webmaster a non-public space which invited others can enter only with a password. Private discussions can remain private or later be made public. All three kinds of discussion can be moderated by an author or webmaster, in which case, one person plays the role of moderator or interviewer, remaining at the edges of the discussion.
A visitor to the site can view or listen to its content and, in some cases, download materials. A person who registers, that is, becomes a subscriber, can write comments. An author can log in, create, and edit posts, as well as comment on posts. Collaborators are groups or institutions who sponsor, support, or contribute substantially to the site. Administrators are the webmasters of the site.
Normally, we invite people to become authors, but you may also request to be made an author. Whether you are a professor, student, artist, ritual-maker, or brick-layer matters less than your willingness and ability to contribute fruitfully to discussions on this site. So tell us who you are and what you would like to do.
When a post is new, it appears as a recent post, eventually being pushed off by newer posts. All discussions, however, remain in the archives, which can be searched by using either categories (of which there are few) or tags, key words (of which there are many). Authors can attach tags to posts in order to facilitate searches.
Some posts date quickly or never develop, but others foster important discussions, feed collaboration, or model good scholarship and pedagogy. When these happen, the webmasters put up a feature tab containing something we consider a useful model for teaching and/or research about ritual. Features may be either short or long. However, to be put on the features page, a discussion must be well written, carefully edited, and well developed. Whereas mere chats will not be selected as features, good dialogues will be. Ask yourself what a model book discussion should look like. How would you like your own book to be reviewed, critiqued, and responded to. Ask yourself what a model photo or video discussion should look, and sound, like. Then, take the initiative. Make a post and invite one or two people, or everyone, if you prefer, to respond. After that, you can shape the interchanges into a model of website interaction. Currently, there are no features on the site.
The events tab lists events such as conferences, courses, and workshops. We will not edit event notices, nor will we post them unless they include all the relevant information such as: title, date, place, e-mail contact, web site address (if any) or fees (if any). The webmasters will not respond to inquiries about events, so readers must know how to contact event organizers.
On the news tab are items of current or popular interest. We invite you to send such items to us for this page. Although comments are possible on news items, if you want to initiate discussion, it is best to create an ordinary post around the news item. The news page contains a Google feed window that displays internet items in which the word “ritual” appears. As you would guess, such automatically generated lists contain a mix of junk along with the humorous and revealing items.
The courses tab links to pages containing syllabi and other materials related to teaching about ritual. If you teach or know about such courses, please send us a link.
The resource tab drops down a menu of sub-pages: bibliographies, links, “R” words, and bookshop. All are lists, databases, or database-like materials. At the moment our drop-down menu works fine when using Mozilla but in some versions of Explorer it works only if you hold down your mouse button while scrolling down the pop-down menu.
Posted on the A-V page are sub-pages for various audio-visual resources such as videos, photos, and music. We invite viewers to send us links to these and other a-v resources (lectures, narratives, interviews, and radio shows) useful to ritual studies students, teachers, and scholars.
We welcome suggestions for, and contributions to, all these pages.
Categories
Below are the categories into which posts are sorted. Authors may slot their posts into more than one category. If none is selected, posts will by default land in “Various.”
| Name | Description |
| Events | conferences, courses, workshops, consultations; ritual events |
| Institutions or groups | e.g., those that control rituals or study rituals |
| Methods for studying ritual | texts, fieldwork, research ethics, research technology, etc. |
| People | e.g., scholars who study ritual, ritual actors |
| Publications, media | e.g., books, journals, films, videos, web sites |
| Research on ritual | processes and/or products of conducting research on ritual; ritual studies as a field; this site: Ritual Studies Dot Com |
| Resources on ritual | databases, bibliographies, filmographies, directories, syllabi, etc. |
| Ritual and other cultural domains | e.g., arts, media, performance, politics, economics |
| Ritual elements or processes | e.g. ritual space, ritual objects, ritual actions; ritual construction, ritual criticism, ritual change |
| Ritual news | ritual in the news |
| Ritual studies | ritual studies, the study of ritual, ritual in the academic disciplines, interdisciplinary approaches to the study of ritual |
| Ritual Studies Dot Com | this website |
| Ritual theory | definitions, concepts, specific theorists or theories, etc. |
| Ritual traditions or systems | ritual practices of…, e.g., Asia, Africa; Buddhists, Jews, etc. |
| Ritual types | e.g., rites of passage, festivals, pilgrimages, seasonal rites, etc. |
| Rituals | specific rituals either singly or comparatively considered |
| Various | everything else |
This document contains instructions, periodically revised, on how to contribute as an author: Authoring on Ritual Studies Dot Com
Detailed instructions on writing posts can be found here: Writing Posts on WordPress