Current
Below is a prospectus for the book I am currently writing for Oxford University Press. It is accurate enough, but, of course, some things have changed, and, like every proposal, it articulates aspirations rather than accomplishments. If the book is half or three-quarters as good as the proposal says it will be, that will be good enough.
Ron
Prospectus
Ritual Creativity and Ritual Conflict: A Theory, Method, and Case Study
Alternate title: Querying Ritual: A Theory, Method, and Case Study
Religious studies has been almost exclusively a textual enterprise. Before the last quarter of the twentieth century, methods for studying ceremonial activity were mainly historical, philosophical, and literary. Although these methods may be adequate for analyzing ancient ritual texts, they are not well suited to studying current ritual events, which are invariably complex, straddling multiple cultural domains such as religion, the arts, and politics. Although rites mark the human life cycle, punctuate public life, and suffuse religious practice, existing theories pay scant attention to ritual’s capacity for nurturing or inhibiting creativity and for mediating or provoking conflict. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a theory and a method capable of guiding research on ritual’s ambiguous role in public and religious settings.
In order to study such events effectively, field research methods are essential. For the past twenty-five years, a few religious studies scholars have been learning methods and borrowing theories, mainly from anthropology. Throughout this period, I have spent much of my time immersed in the particulars of specific ritual events transpiring in situations where ritual and the performing arts overlap or where religious and ethnic conflict erupts. Each boundary crossing has required interview, participation, documentation, and interpretation in tandem with reflection on problems of ritual theory and ethnographic method.
Debates over theory and method are perennial, but their dynamics vary considerably among academic disciplines. In religious studies, theory and method research has been embroiled in polarized debates over scientific versus theological perspectives. In my view, this debate, which is preoccupied with religious ideas, texts, and beliefs, has stagnated. The stagnation is due partly to a style of theorizing that is out of touch with the study of actual, on-the-ground religious practices. A worthwhile theory must be practice-oriented, and practices are most effectively studied by field research methods.
Building on insights from ritual studies, symbolic anthropology, and performance studies, I propose to synthesize a systematic theory and method capable of underwriting the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of ritual enactments that sprawl across cultural domains. The proposed book will be divided into three sections—a theoretical one, a methodological one, and a case study. The theoretical section will be divided into a critical and a constructive part. The methodological part will propose strategies and methods for ritual studies field research, but also for research that combines ethnographic with historical or textual methods. The case study, both written and multimedia, will illustrate how the theory and method are constructed, applied to a specific ritual performance, tested, and then refined.
The book requires both critical and constructive work. The critical task is to expose the limitations that disable many theories of ritual, for example, defining ritual as essentially religious, assuming that ritual’s only function is to generate group solidarity, or treating ritual as a mirror of the status quo. I will argue that rites are not passive reflections of texts, ideas, or social structures.
The constructive task is to explain how rites, using performative means, interact creatively and critically with their social surroundings. I will systematically develop themes that permeate my publications in ritual studies: the relation of ritual to media, theatre, and film; the dynamics of ritual creativity; the negotiation of ritual conflict and criticism; the relationship between cultural practices and scholarly theories; the bodily nature of ritual; the impact of ritual on cultural and physical environments.
The methodology section will propose strategies and offer guidelines for conducting field research on the public performance of rites. The aim is to guide fieldwork on complex ritual enactments, especially those characterized by social conflict or cultural creativity. The methods proposed will employ tools honed in the Ritual Studies Lab (for pedagogical and field research on ritual) and in the Waterloo Religions Project (on religious diversity in southern Ontario), both of which I directed.
The case study will contain a written part as well as a multimedia part. The case study, documented on DVD and designed to interface with the book, will provide an illustration of how the theory and method work when applied to an annual civic and religious enactment, one that has been widely praised for its intercultural creativity and roundly criticized for its protracted ethnic conflict. The case study will have a written as well as a DVD component and focus on a single, but complex, event, the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta, a New Mexico celebration marked by protracted ethnic conflict and ongoing dramatic creativity. Rich in visual culture and replete with processions, liturgies, celebrations, civic speeches, pageants, and concerts, the fiesta lends itself to ethnographic description, and video documentation. The situation also provokes reflection on the ethics and politics of fieldwork.
Since 1973, supported by two residencies at the School of American Research (an anthropological institute in Santa Fe), I have followed the development of the fiesta, conducted research on religious conflict in the Southwest, and worked on issues of theory and method. In 1992 my fiesta research was the impetus for making a controversial documentary, Gathering up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe (Jeanette DeBouzek, director). Returning to the 2007 fiesta thirty years after my original ethnography (Symbol and Conquest, 1976) and producing a second, briefer multimedia study based on both historical-textual and ethnographic research would accomplish the following goals: (a) documenting changes in ritual creativity and conflict across a generation, thus producing a longitudinal view of ritual change; (b) illustrating and evaluating the proposed theory and method; and (c) offering a case study designed to facilitate comparative or cross-cultural study of public ritual enactments.
The DVD is not an add-on to provide local color. It is an essential component of the proposed theory and method, which advocate audio-visual documentation as both a tool for analysis and an object of critique. The DVD would present and analyze fiesta religion and culture, but its other purpose would be to demonstrate how researchers design, carry out, and negotiate the conditions for ritual studies research. The result would be a model that scholars and students of ritual can use for research on future ritual enactments.
The proposed book will having the following distinctive features:
• interdisciplinary breadth. Although I am a religious studies scholar and a major part of the theory is about the religious dimension of ritual action, my writing about ritual is broad and synthetic. The book will take into account the full range of ritual, including rites of passage, civil ceremony, religious liturgy, and public celebration. To study these effectively, a scholar must move with ease across disciplinary lines.
• advanced multimedia technology. One argument of the book is that the performative nature of ritual requires audio-visual documentation. Not content to use media as mere illustration of textual data, I will propose ways of analyzing the visual documentation of ritual performances. Writing a book integrated with DVD documentation necessitates attention to current trends in visual anthropology as well as competence in digital technology. Currently, I teach a course on field research as well as one on religion and visual culture. I also have the video production and editing skills necessary to create the DVD, and Oxford University Press has agreed to publish the book with an accompanying DVD.
• international collaboration. Ritual studies is at a critical juncture. Originally a North American enterprise, ritual studies is now also taking root in the Netherlands and Germany, as well as in Sweden, England, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, and Israel. The proposed book would provide a much-needed focal point for emerging international collaboration, as well as consolidate the theoretical and methodological dimensions of my own research.
• training doctoral students. The project will train students, who will become future researchers and teachers. Most directly, it will train the doctoral-student members of the research team, whose job is not only to document ritual events but also to assess the utility of the theory and method. By the time it reaches publication, the book/DVD should be well suited for use in graduate courses in religious studies, ritual studies, performance studies, and anthropology.
• methodological guidance. With only one or two exceptions, major theorists of ritual (such as Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Gilbert Lewis, Roy Rappaport, Catherine Humphrey and James Laidlaw, Catherine Bell, Jonathan Z. Smith, Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Eugene d’Aquili and Charles Laughlin, for example) focus almost exclusively on theory or on ethnographic details, with little attention to method. The difficulty with this kind of theory-construction is that it is not explicit about how to operationalize the theory. The methodology and case study that I propose will provide a detailed illustration of the theory and method at work on both contemporary ethnographic and historical textual data.
• performance- and practice-oriented. I will argue that performance and practice theories are the best suited for studying actual ritual events (as distinct from ritual texts or neurological structures underlying ritual activity). Since the strengths and weaknesses of performance theories are currently being compared with practice theories and cognitive psychological theories, I will enter this debate, building a case for performance theory in the study of ritual.
• attending to the entire ritual process, from planning through aftermath. Many theories of ritual examine only the public face of ritual or the social structures in which it occurs. Often, such approaches ignore backstage preparation as well as post-performance consequences and assessments. I will show why it is crucial for researchers to follow the process of ritual construction, as well as attend to the process of evaluating and consuming rites.
• addressing public concerns and challenging cliches about the nature, function, and meaning of ritual. Ritual is popularly dismissed as boring, religiously venerated as sacrosanct, and academically castigated for buttressing oppressive regimes. Televised commemorations of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Pierre Trudeau, as well as post-9/11 memorials, have brought rites into public view, where they have become objects of scrutiny, critique, and interpretation. Not only religious studies scholars and public figures but also ordinary people require nuanced perspectives not mired in the timeworn cliches: that ritual is decorative, mindless, or rote; that ritual is sacrosanct and therefore above criticism; that ritual retards progress by conditioning participants to be backward-looking. A major aim of the book is to provide a fresh perspective on this poorly understood phenomenon and to espouse a view that encourages informed reflection on ritual enactments in civic as well as sacred spaces.