Theorizing Rituals, Volume 1: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts

Animal Biographies in the Iron Age of Wessex:

“…Despite arguments from authors such as Brück (1999) that we should jettison the term 'ritual', a heavily loaded term to archaeologists, we know that ritual activities do occur in everyday life. These can be for instance secular, religious, class-related, sex-related and personal (Bell 1997;Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994;Kreinath et al 2006). A classic example are the multitude of different feasting events which occur throughout a calendar year in the United Kingdom -birthdays, weddings, funerals, Easter, Christmas, academic conferences and so on.…”

Cognitive Science in the Study of Early Christianity: Why It Is Helpful – and How?

“…The relationship between ritual and religious knowledge has been a traditional issue in the study of religion, and one variation on this question is related to semiotic approaches to ritual. 67 Harvey Whitehouse, who has pioneered cognitive approaches in social anthropology, offers the simple but important observation that religious traditions cannot emerge without two things taking place: first, people have to be able to remember the beliefs and rituals involved in the tradition, and second, they have to become motivated to pass on those beliefs and rituals. 68 Memory and motivation are thus the crucial constraining factors in the transmission of a tradition.…”

Mesopotamian Medicine and Religion: Current Debates, New Perspectives

“…In the vigorous âšipu-debates over the years the word 'magic' has cropped up repeatedly, as it is wont to do in any discussion of Mesopotamian medicine, but rarely as more than 'a relatively self-evident term by which we may conveniently label genres of texts, because we identify the practices referred to implied in those texts as "magical" ' (van Binsbergen & Wiggermann 1999, p. 4;my emphasis). Given that the majority of the Neo-Assyrian royal âšipus' correspondence is concerned with preserving and protecting the king's relationship with the divine through performance of protective, apologetic, or cleansing actions, it seems to me that ideas of ritual and purification are worth exploring further, not least because both terms (admittedly no less difficult to grasp than 'magic') have recently been subject to extensive and stimulating theoretical analysis (e.g., Wilson 1994;Bell 1997;Insoll 2004;Kreinath et al 2006;Campkin & Cox 2007;Smith 2007). Further, the term 'magic' categorises a set of thoughts and activities as alien to the mindset and lifestyles of those of us moderns who study the ancient world, and thus risks belittling, trivialising, or even denigrating those ideas and practices, while ritual-like activities, and concerns about bodies' and spaces' cleanliness or pollution, are as much a part of modern, Western society as they were of Mesopotamian culture.…”