Folklore of the Transgender Community in Tamilnadu

17 April 2010

This Youtube video documentary, edited from a year of documentation,  depicts the initiation and adoption rituals in transgender communities of Tamilnadu, India.

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Spirit Possession and Trance

3 April 2010

Spirit possession is a phenomenon that often elicits a response of fear, particular in those who are ignorant of its meaning and role within its particular religious and cultural traditions. Possession by divine beings (such as spirits or gods) is, however, a key practice in religions worldwide. It is therefore important to gain an understanding of [...]

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Infelicitous Performances

14 January 2010

I’ve been working intermittently for about 30 years (first as a writer of feminist/neopagan rituals, and then as a sort of wildcat theorist) on the question of aesthetics in liturgical language. Of course there’s more to ritual than language, but the words surrounding ritual actions can make or break them: they may not be infelicitous [...]

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Ritual Irony?

12 January 2010

In these two videos Kate MacGarry has followed Marcus Coates as he “shamanically” embodies animals and performs bird calls. Is he serious? Ironic? Merely playing? Both? Is this bad ritual? Bad theater? Good ritual? Good theatre? Installation art? And, aside from the genre question, do such events really matter to anyone other than the artists/shaman? [...]

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Harry Potter and the Persistence of Ritual

7 August 2009

Nancy Gibbs ends her August 3, Time magazine “Briefing” with a note on the impending 2011 releases of the final Harry Potter films based on The Deathly Hallows. After then, no more Harry Potter films. Oh, dear. She finishes her piece with the lingering thought: “After that, it will be up to fans to find [...]

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Rehearsal for the Raising of the Cross

19 April 2009

The webmasters have invited the artist and several others to discuss these images. What is, or might be, their relevance to ritual or its study? Would they enhance a ritual? Detract from it? Would it depend on what kind of ritual? Are the images ”artistic” or ”liturgical?” What’s the difference, if any? How might, or ought, a student of [...]

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Photos on the Home Page

Thumbnail image for Photos on the Home Page 10 April 2009

What Have They Got To Do With Ritual?
Now come on, guys, what do the photos that cycle through the front page got to do with ritual? What are we looking at anyway? Surely, it’s not good enough just to stick some old picture up. Isn’t doing this like those silly commercials that have nothing whatever [...]

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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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‘Musicking’ – Symphony and Ceremony

27 March 2009

Christopher Small has spent much of his scholarly career arguing that a classical European symphony concert is a musical ceremony. He does not argue that a symphony is ceremonial rather than musical. Instead, he says a concert has social dimensions that we do not often recognize and that the most appropriate label for those dimensions [...]

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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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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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