From the category archives:

Research on ritual

Aaron’s Zozobra

29 March 2009

A domestic celebration during the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta (New Mexico, USA)

Below is a short video from my research on the Santa Fe Fiesta. Eventually, I will ask the family in that video to come online and respond to it. Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. Maybe they will love it; maybe they’ll hate it. [...]

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The Potential of New Media: Music and Ritual

24 March 2009

With the advent of multimedia publishing, scholars are no longer limited to written or visual communication. Rather than write about, for example, ritualization in the animal world, translating sounds into text, we can integrate sounds into our presentations, interpretations, theories, criticisms, simply by embedding an audio file in a small video player, like this: Sounds [...]

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Diana’s Funeral

23 March 2009

It seems to me that Diana’s funeral was of a new sort, one so fundamentally mediated and global, that we could not longer thing of the mediation as something tacked on, something extra.

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Ritual Images

20 March 2009

The images in texts and textbooks devoted to ritual are often of poor quality and limited due to cost. Since much ritual is highly visual, it makes sense that students of ritual tend to photographing rites. Photographing ritual opens up methodological and theoretical questions, but also technical and aesthetic ones. We offer here two different examples of [...]

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Krishna’s Birthday

19 March 2009

During Krishnajayanti, the birthday celebration for Krishna (a form of Vishnu) at the Varadaraja temple in Kanchipuram, oil is distributed to the devotees as prasadam (blessing) of the god. The oil is used on the hair, reminding of Krishna’s beauty which made all the “cow-girls” (Gopis) fall in love with him. On the picture we [...]

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