Full Description
This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, 'Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource' (REDO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The chapters document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.
Contents
Introduction
Sarah M. Pike, Jone Salomonsen and Paul-François Tremlett
Part 1: Protests
Chapter 1: Rituals of Resistance and the Struggle over Democracy in Turkey
Agnes Czajka, The Open University
Chapter 2: Making Ritual Enactments Political: Free Speech after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks
Zaki Nahaboo, Birmingham City University
Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Energies: The Political Agency of Things
Paul François Tremlett
Part 2: Publics
Chapter 4: Affective Communitas and Sacred Geography: Mapping Place and Movement in Norwegian Pilgrimage
Marion Grau, MF Norwegian School of Theology
Chapter 5: How to Do Things with Rituals, or: Disrupting Protestant Lutheran Theology, Converting Refugees and their Appropriation of the Eucharist
Gitte Buch-Hansen, University of Copenhagen
Part 3: Performances
Chapter 6: Dances of Self-development as a Resource for Participatory Democracy
Michael Houseman, PSL Research University, France, and Marie Mazzella di Bosco, PhD Candidate, Paris Nanterre University
Chapter 7: Trans-Indigenous Festivals: Democracy and Emplacement
Graham Harvey, The Open University
