Ritualization of Texts and Textualization of Ritual in the Codification of Taoist Liturgy

Early in the fifth century in China, the Taoist master began to edit a set of scriptures that had been revealed years earlier. These were the Ling-pao or Spiritual tures, considered to be the second major scriptural development of medieval Taoism. 1 In reconstructing corpus of Ling-pao scriptures from among a multitude and forgeries, Lu worked to present these texts as revelation of the Tao in history, thereby inhibiting further and securing some closure on an early canon. At however, Lu began to codify the ritual material contained scriptures to fashion the liturgical directives that for much of the subsequent Taoist tradition

Religion through Ritual

This chapter addresses the ramifications of, as well as strategies for, teaching ritual as a central feature of religion. This marks an important change in the approach to teaching both religion and ritual, and one of the functions of this book is to address specific issues that this change poses to teachers and scholars. It is a continual challenge to imagine how to teach religion, using ritual, in introductory courses, in courses on specific traditions, and in advanced classes that include more of the theory of the field and extended individual projects. Teaching religion with a significant focus on ritual does not merely challenge the tradition of thinking about religion; it challenges every religion major to try to make sense of discrepancies in views about religion that they learn from other faculties

Preface to Ritual: Dimensions and Perspectives

While each of the major sections of this book plays a role in constructing the overall argument about ritual, they also organize the issues and data autonomously in terms of three distinct frameworks. Part I, Theories: The History of Interpretations, presents a roughly chronological ordering of the most influential approaches to defining and explaining ritual behavior. It begins with theories concerning the origins of religion and then depicts the emergence of various schools that have developed distinctive perspectives for analyzing ritual. While far from exhaustive, this account tries to highlight the significance of ritual to most of the important understandings of religion and culture. This account also suggests that the history of theories contains only limited instances of any progressive development and refinement of the idea of ritual. To a great extent, multiple and even mutually exclusive perspectives on ritual continue to coexist due to fundamental indeterminacies that attend the identification of ritual, on the one hand, and historical changes in the projects of scholarly analysis, on the other. Nonetheless, to provide as much clarity as possible, there are three special sections that present extended “profiles” of specific rituals that have been much studied by the preceding theoretical schools. These profiles give readers the opportunity to compare and contrast how different theoretical approaches have actually interpreted particular rites

Religion and Chinese Culture: Toward an Assessment of Popular Religion

Shifts in terminology may be harbingers of a revolutionary new paradigm or a repackaging of older dilemmas. Recently some terminological rearrangements have emerged with sufficient consistency in studies of Chinese religion and culture to warrant examination of their implicit assumptions and practical ramifications. In brief, the trend in the study of Chinese religion, and in the history of religions generally, has been to talk of popular religion, local religion, or, most recently, popular religious cultures instead of folk and elite religions or great and little traditions.\u27 Certainly, the problems besetting the older terms have been amply debated and demonstrated. However, are the new terms more effective replacements? That is, do they actually transcend the persistent assumptions of their predecessors, enabling us to perceive and analyze dynamics barely visible on earlier hori- zons? From the standpoints of five recent books on Chinese religion and culture, the horizon certainly begins to look less familiar and more promising. Although these books may not constitute a revolution, both their modest revisions as well as their daring near misses suggest that the study of Chinese religion is undergoing a fascinating shift. There is a new maturity in the variety of disciplines contributing perspectives and data to an open dialogue on basic issues. There is also a new deftness and simplicity in the focus on religious phenomena, a focus that does not isolate religion for the sake of a false clarity but rather explores religion as fully embedded in society and culture. Finally, one theme is central to all of these books-to uncover popular religion and to analyze the relationship between religion and culture implied by such a phenomenon. By exploring the treatments of this theme, I hope to discern the direction of these works as a whole and to begin to assess the innovations they introduce

Ritual, Change, and Changing Rituals

Liturgical reform has not been well received by some cultural anthropologists and sociologists of religion. Most, of course, have ignored this quiet revolution and its ramifications, but a few have reacted strongly. In this very journal, for example, the justly renowned anthropologist Victor Turner lamented the loss of the dignified pre-Conciliar Mass and the emergence of relevant liturgical experimentation.1 Turner\u27s reaction is not an isolated case among scholars, although it may be the most direct.2 Such opinions clearly suggest the dangers of forsaking scholarly distance or appealing to a professional expertise to decide what is proper ritual and what is not. It is doubtful, for example, that Turner would have so harshly judged ritual reforms carefully deliberated and implemented by the Ndembu. Yet with regard to Catholic ritual, he even backed his critique with the credentials of science. 3 The root of such reactions, however, is not simply a loss of objectivity or a display of scientific aggrandizement. Rather, selfconsciously changing ritual presents scholars with a major conundrum, a contradiction of sorts that is rooted in the history of approaches to the study of ritual

The Ritual Body and The Dynamics of Ritual Power

This essay will attempt to address the distinctive qualities of ritual power so as to explore both ritual and power. To do so, I will bypass the frameworks of rationalism, functionalism, and expressive symbolism (or symbolic communicationism ) in order to focus on the construction and deployment of the ritual body. The body has recently emerged as a major focus of analysis in a number of disciplines, reflecting the development and convergence of several lines of thought. First, a tradition of ethnographic and theoretical exploration of body symbolism stretching from Marcel Mauss to Mary Douglas has explored how social categories, particularly as highlighted in ritual, shape the perception, disposition, and decoration of the body. Second, a shift in the dominant models employed by the humanities and social sciences has led to the gradual abandonment of the dualities of mind/body, individual/society, and even message/medium. Instead there are attempts to deal with the embodied mind, the sociallyembedded person, and the media-massaged message. Finally, the recognition of gender as a fundamental condition of experience and category of analysis has promoted attention to the cultural constructions involved in the socialization of one\u27s most basic physical sense of biological identity. It is noteworthy that even philosophy, a relative stronghold of the detached mental self, has recently contributed two studies of the body, George Lakoffs Women, Fire and Other Dangerous Things (1987) and Mark Johnson\u27s The Body in the Mind (1987). Likewise, the work of historians such as Peter Brown (1988) looks beyond the social construction of institutions to the construction of the social bodies that mandate such institutions. No longer the mere physical instrument of the mind, it appears that the image of the body is being reappropriated to denote a more complex and irreducible phenomenon, namely, the social person

Performance

Scholars use many terms to talk about religious activity, most basically, liturgy, worship, ritual, and recently performance. Although these terms reflect different perspectives and assumptions, they share the supposition that ceremonial actions characterized by a self-conscious formality and traditionalism are a primary aspect of religion and an important focus in any project to understand religion. Nonetheless, most theories of religion since the Enlightenment have tended to emphasize the more cognitive aspects of religion no matter how rooted these were thought to be in emotional, doctrinal, or communal experience. In the last several decades, however, religious studies has become (as have other fields such as anthropology, history, and psychology) increasingly concerned to give more attention to the actual doing of religion. In this venture, the term ritual, which pioneered the attempt to get beyond confessional perspectives by suggesting a nearly universal stmcture to religious activities, has attracted some criticism. Major critiques note its long-standing complicity in bifurcating thought and action, its unilateral imposition of symbolic intentionality, and the globalization by which nearly everything becomes some sort of ritual (Bell 1992; Asad 1993; Goody 1977). The term performance attempts to minimize these problems and explore religious activity more fully in terms of the qualities of human action. Interest in the language of performance has been multifaceted, explicitly experimental, and occasionally quite idiosyncratic. While there are some islands of consensus, there is little systematic direction or assessment. Indeed, an exclusive emphasis on performance has receded in favor of a broader set of terms used alongside performance, notably ritualization and ritual practice. Yet by virtue of a shared concern to deal with action as action, all of these theoretical orientations can be loosely grouped as performance approaches to the study of religion. Moreover, despite their heterogeneity, they have been sufficiently coherent and dynamic to influence fundamental orientations in the study of religion today

Introduction to Ritual Theory Ritual Practice

This book undertakes such an analysis in two ways: first, through a critical reading of how the notion of ritual has been used in the study of religion, society, and culture; and second, through an attempt to carve out an approach to ritual activities that is less encumbered by assumptions about thinking and acting and more disclosing of the strategies by which ritualized activities do what they do. I do not provide a comprehensive history of the term, a review of the most famous ethnographic examples, or a revised theory of ritual—useful though these projects might be. The purpose of this book is both more ambitious and more pragmatic— to reassess what we have been doing with the category of ritual, why we have ended up where we are, and how we might formulate an analytic direction better able to grasp how such activities compare to other forms of social action