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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.