Description
Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"
Table of Contents
1 Ritual, Media, and Conflict: An IntroductionRonald L. Grimes2 From Ritual Ground to StageFletcher DuBois, Erik de Maaker, Karin Polit, and Marianne Riphagen3 Insurgents and IconsAnna-Karina Hermkens and Eric Venbrux4 Ritual as a Source of ConflictRobert Langer, Thomas Quartier, Udo Simon, Jan Snoek, and Gerard Wiegers5 Place, Action, and Community in Internet RitualsMarga Altena, Catrien Notermans, Thomas Widlok6 Contested Rituals in Virtual WorldsSimone Heidbrink, Nadja Miczek, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler7 Media on the Ritual BattlefieldIgnace de Haes, Ute Hüsken, and Paul van der Velde8 What's at Stake in Torture?Werner Binder, Tom F. Driver, and Barry Stephenson9 Refracting Ritual: An Upside-down Perspective on Ritual, Media and ConflictMichael Houseman
