Play Ritual Representation

Includes 159 color images. Baodingshan consists of a monastic complex and two rock-carved areas, Little Buddha Bend and Great Buddha Bend, located in Dazu in western China and dates from the Southern Song period. The complex is fundamentally different from earlier Buddhist rock-carved sites in China in its construction and layout. Foregoing traditional niche-based iconography for large, deeply cut reliefs reaching dimensions as great as eight meters high by twenty meters wide, within Baodingshan's Great Buddha Bend, the carved works flow from one tableau into another. The site contains both texts and images related to the main schools of Buddhist thought. This book presents an integrated analysis of all of the components of Great Buddha Bend within the greater Baodingshan site, something that was lacking in earlier studies. Written to provide guidance to the site for a wide spectrum of readers-specialists and non-specialists alike-it provides a clear explanation of the major iconographic features of the imagery as well as translations of the numerous accompanying carved Buddhist texts. It also presents the basic tenets of Pure Land, Chan [Zen], Huayan and Esoteric Buddhism in order to explain the features of these sects as seen represented in visual as well as textual form at the site. Lastly, with its focus on ritual use and audience reception from the 12th to the 21st century, this study provides a new model for the discussion and evaluation of other religious sites as entities that organically evolve over time. This study also includes new translations of both the inscribed Buddhist texts and secular inscriptions carved at the site dating from the twelfth through the twenty-first centuries-inscriptions left by educated elite, soldiers, and government officials, highlighting regional issues related to continuity and change made visible at Baodingshan.

This book presents unique new insights into the development of human ritual and society through our heritage of play and performance.

Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys -- sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.

Roy Rappaport argues that religion is central to the continuing evolution of life, although it has been been displaced from its original position of intellectual authority by the rise of modern science. His book, which could be construed as in some degree religious as well as about religion, insists that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches to the study of humankind, he mounts a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, seeing it as co-extensive with the invention of language and hence of culture as we know it. At the same time he assembles the fullest study yet of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions which we take to be religious and has been central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from anthropology, history, philosophy, comparative religion, and elsewhere.

Ritual has long been a central concept in anthropological theories of religious transmission. Ritual, Performance and the Senses offers a new understanding of how ritual enables religious representations – ideas, beliefs, values – to be shared among participants. Focusing on the body and the experiential nature of ritual, the book brings together insights from three distinct areas of study: cognitive/neuroanthropology, performance studies and the anthropology of the senses. Eight chapters by scholars from each of these sub-disciplines investigate different aspects of embodied religious practice, ranging from philosophical discussions of belief to explorations of the biological processes taking place in the brain itself. Case studies range from miracles and visionary activity in Catholic Malta to meditative practices in theatrical performance and include three pilgrimage sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the festival of Ramlila in Ramnagar, India and the mountain shrine of the Lord of the Shiny Snow in Andean Peru.Understanding ritual allows us to understand processes at the very centre of human social life and humanity itself, making this an invaluable text for students and scholars in anthropology, cognitive science, performance studies and religious studies.

In this richly illustrated volume, Paul Binski provides an absorbing account of the social, theological, and cultural issues involved in death and dying in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the early sixteenth century. He draws on textual, archaeological, and art historical sources to examine pagan and Christian attitudes toward the dead, the aesthetics of death and the body, burial ritual, and mortuary practice. Illustrated throughout with fascinating and sometimes disturbing images, Binski's account weaves together close readings of a variety of medieval thinkers. He discusses the impact of the Black Death on late medieval art and examines the development of the medieval tomb, showing the changing attitudes toward the commemoration of the dead between late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. In one chapter, Binski analyzes macabre themes in art and literature, including the Dance of Death, which reflect the medieval obsession with notions of humility, penitence, and the dangers of bodily corruption. In another, he studies the progress of the soul after death through the powerful descriptions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Dante and other writers and through portrayals of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse in sculpture and large-scale painting.

Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.