Eds. by Pamela J. Stewart, and Andrew J. Strathern. 2022. The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, 395 pp, ISBN 978-3-030-76824-9  

Keywords: ritual; ritualization; performance; religion; cultural creativity.

This volume engages in the varied and complex field of ritual practices, with a special focus on religious rituals. The work contributes to the field’s vitality with original approaches emerging directly from data collected from a great variety of contexts. The contributions combine critical overviews of theoretical and methodological approaches and in-depth ethnographic research. Ritual and other key concepts, such as performance, sacrifice, religion, magic and sport, are complicated through a variety of viewpoints, methods and ethnographic data. Particular emphasis is given to ritual’s dynamism, historical processes, and to the complex relationship between continuity, creativity, adaptability, cross-contextual influences, imposition and individual agency.

The book is divided into four parts. In the introductory chapter, Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart trace a critical overview of ritual studies, pointing out the dynamic between continuity and change, and explore main themes and less-studied aspects of rituals, such as concealment, “absent rituals,” failure, contestation and negotiation. The first part presents new perspectives on established themes in ritual studies. In Chapter 2, Roger Ivan Lohmann considers charismatic Christian practices of dream sharing in Papua New Guinea as a form of reproducing and democratising charisma. Through a combination of synchronic and diachronic analysis, he shows the articulation of enthusiasm and stability in religious services as well as ruptures and continuity with traditional religious practices. In Chapter 3, Günther Schörner develops a critical overview of theoretical approaches and historical, anthropological and archaeological sources on sacrifice, expanding beyond animal killing. The chapter explores aspects such as performativity, language, meaning, aim, aesthetic and emotional experience, human and more-than-human relationships, as well as the contextualization of rituals in historical, cultural, social and environmental settings. In Chapter 4, Thomas Widlok analyses how a better understanding of the wider spectrum of economic transfers can improve our understanding of religions and rituals, using the key concept of sharing as a form of dealing with asymmetries among humans and between humans and other beings and forces. He also explores sharing in ritual and religious practices both in egalitarian and hierarchical societies, such as the San of Southern African and the Catholic Church, and its interconnections with economic processes, social and political relationships and daily life practices. Based on ethnographic research on prophetic churches in Angola, in Chapter 5, Ruy Llera Blanes examines how ritualised acts of cortesia (courtesy) are rife with ambiguity, since they are used not only to express hospitality, but also produce a sense of foreignness, distinction and separation from (internal and foreign) others and confirms hierarchical positions. These acts inform aesthetic, bodily and social interactions, and are connected with traditional values, historical processes and politics. In Chapter 6, Nigel Rapport analyses how the creation and performance of personal rituals furnish a sense of “home,” a comfortably informal, personal lifeworld, security and familiarity, as well as an anchorage for personal identity in situations of mobility, such as migration and work. Key concepts include “ritual consciousness,” that “concerns the particular, subjective way in which a kind of reiteration and transcendence is thought and felt by a particular individual” (p.124), reflectivity, intentionality, instrumentality, and a private