Full Description
This volume brings together representative case studies and surveys that explore research into ritual language, covering theoretical and methodological approaches that reflect traditional inquiries and more recent studies. This recent literature contends that ritual language hinges on the construction of authoritative ontological models about the cosmos and its inhabitants. Ritual speech also orchestrates performances that articulate representations of collective identities, and rests on the diversity of hierarchical forms of authoritative knowledge, displayed in both oblique and direct terms. Moreover, performances, texts, and narratives associated with ritual practices are closely entwined with historical accounts that navigate current memories, recast in a diversity of ways, about ancestral beings and distant or recent pasts, or delimit a terrain in which dialectical relationships with colonial hegemony and Christian indoctrination emerge to transform the social order. Ritual narrative often offers in its structure and delivery momentous representation of the social order, social institutions, social difference, and collective identities, and may also be constituted by claims about relations among species, non-human actors, and material culture.
The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language addresses foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, use, and consequences of ritual language. The chapters examine the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social world. As the study of ritual speech hinges on extensive analyses of linguistic choices and styles, the contributors draw on data from a wide range of language groups and societies in the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean.
Contents
Part I. Ritual Language in History and Anthropology
1: David Tavárez: Language, ritual, and colonialism: A brief cultural history
2: David Tavárez: The anthropology of ritual language: Classic and contemporary approaches
Part II. Rethinking Ritual Language in Method and Theory
3: Kristina Wirtz: The chronotopic and sonotopic work of ritual
4: Paul Christopher Johnson: The language of secrecy
5: Janet McIntosh: The ritual language of militarization
6: Timothy W. Knowlton: Language and ritual healing
Part III. Ritual Language, Colonialism, and State Hegemony
7: Jennifer Scheper Hughes: Ritual language and sacred labor in Greater Mexico
8: Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt: Ritual speech and text in early Cherokee Christianity
9: Abdelmajid Hannoum: Colonial rule, modernity, and rituals of royal power in Morocco
10: Courtney Handman: Ritual, media, and the here-and-now of decolonization
11: Magnus Fiskesjö: Ritual language and forced confessions in China
Part IV. Ritual Language, Cosmology, and Identity
12: Sergio Romero: Language, ritual, and political legitimation in colonial Guatemala
13: Paul Liffman: Indigenous territoriality and the mediation of space and scale in ritual language
14: Alexandre Surrallés: Affectivity and repetition in Amazonian ceremonial welcoming dialogues
15: Abelardo de la Cruz: Language, Nahua life-cycle rituals, and Indigenous identity
16: Bruce Mannheim: Places that talk--and listen: Southern Quechua
Part V. Ritual Speech and the Arts of Sociability
17: Paul Manning: Drinking, talking, and ritual action
18: Sonia N. Das: Ritual language and police discretion
19: Nikolas Sweet: Ritual language in West Africa: Participation and performance
20: Sean O'Neill: Language, worldview, and rituals of daily social interaction
Part VI. Ritual Language, Mediation, and Pluralism
21: Adam Harr: Scalar poetics in ritual language
22: Louis Römer: Rituals of mourning and the poetics of Papiamentu talk radio
23: Morgan Siewert: Ritualized learning and endangered languages
24: Nishaant Choksi: Embodied ritual performance and new writing systems
