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 [...]

Santa Fe Fiesta (New Mexico, USA) Below is a short montage based from field research on the Santa Fe Fiesta 2007. Four other videos are in the set, each one more extensive or probing than the preceding one.   Sights and Sounds of the Santa Fe Fiesta from Ronald L. Grimes on Vimeo.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]