Browsing by Subject "Ritual"
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Item Affecting change : death, violence and protest in Manipur, Northeastern India(2015-05) Kshetrimayum, Jogendro Singh; Stewart, Kathleen, 1953-This dissertation explores some of the ways in which precarity takes form in a reeling present. Many social and political analysts have described the contemporary socio-economic and political situation in the Northeastern states of India, marked by a situation of civil war for more than half-a-century, as an “impasse.” With particular focus on Manipur, one of the eight Northeastern states, this dissertation looks at some of the ways in which people live through this “impasse.” Through a series of extraordinary and ordinary scenes, brief encounters, public testimonies, biographical sketches and autobiographical accounts it speaks of the precariousness of life, relationships, rituals and cultural categories even as people suffer and respond to the ongoing “crisis” of law and order, a defining feature of the “impasse.” Inspired by the affective turn in Critical Theory, this dissertation does not see precarity as necessarily traumatizing, thereby keeping the trope of trauma at a critical distance while attending to the lives of people in a situation of low-intensity armed conflict of long duration. It does not claim to provide any final explanation of what is happening in Manipur today rather it offers an innovative way to revisit anew some of the old anthropological questions about people and places undergoing dramatic changes.Item 'All About is Night': Spiritual anxiety and the ritual impulse in World War I Europe(2011-08) Berry, James B.; Smith, Christopher; Jocoy, Stacey; Cimarusti, Thomas M.; Borshuk, Michael; Durham, GenevieveWorld War I was a seminal moment in the history of Western Culture. The five years between 1914 and 1919 changed the world forever through political revolution, economic upheavals, and intellectual turmoil. There was an overwhelming impression that the progress of human culture foreseen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was forever lost. The lives of everyone, including those previously on the forefront of the musical avant-garde, were thrown into chaos. There was a general fear that the War had forever separated the present from the past; that the past had died along with the millions of young men on the battlefields of Europe and the future was uncertain. Modern civilization had become mortal and felt as fragile as life. Composers responded to this sense of ‘fragility’ by seeking to create music whose sense of order, ritual, or spiritual renewal could speak to human needs. Composers such as Erik Satie and Ralph Vaughan Williams addressed early 20th-century disconnect with the past and fears of disorder in the present through the creation of music whose “ritual connotations” reflected the impulses of, and human needs expressed by, sacred music, even in the absence of its liturgical function. This document explores this thesis by examining the effects of the War on Western Culture and discussing the influence of the conflict on the writings of David Jones and J.R.R. Tolkien. Erik Satie and Ralph Vaughan Williams are taken as case studies of the ritual implications in responses to World War I. The document concludes that knowledge of the ritual connotations of certain musical works is crucial for the understanding of the War’s influence.Item Artaud's "Daughters" : "Plague," "Double," and "Cruelty" as feminist performance practices of transformation(2012-05) Barfield, Heather Leigh; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-; Canning, Charlotte; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-; Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul; Strong, Pauline; Stone, AllucquereThe purpose of this study was to identify Artaudian criteria contained in three different performance practices including (1) a television performance, (2) a live performance, and (3) a workshop performance. These included, respectively, (1) an episode from The X-Files television series; (2) MetamorphoSex, a live ritual performance with performance artist Annie Sprinkle; and (3) Rachel Rosenthal’s DbD Experience Workshop. Core criteria of Artaudian Theater of Cruelty were established through analyses of the relevant literature. These criteria were then coupled with characteristics of French feminist theory and a “shamanistic” perspective to create a theoretical-analytic tool with Artaudian criteria as its centerpiece. Also, performance analysis, experiential and experimental reflexive-subjectivity, and performative poetics were techniques applied for analytic purposes. Analyses identified a range of Artaudian criteria and feminist and “shamanistic” characteristics in the three performances; these included radical and performative poetics, embodied states of ecstasy and transformation, and non-reliance on written texts and scripts in performance practices. Among other things, analyses of different performance practices indicates that identified Artaudian performances, as a whole, tend to hinge upon performing “in the extreme” and may inadvertently serve to reinscribe race and imperialist hegemonies through an exaggeration of performing “whiteness in the extreme.” Additionally, women performing “in the extreme” are often unfairly characterized as heightened and exaggerated examples of “womanness.” Masked behind themes of women’s empowerment are cultural and performative archetypes of woman as “goddess,” “monster,” or heartless “cyborg.” Implications of these findings are discussed as well as the creation of public spaces where groups of people gather for an “extreme” performative event that, through dramatic spectacle and purpose, unites them with a particular theme or focus. It is argued that such spaces have the potential to catalyze endeavors seeking transformation and, in particular, transform the social lives of the participants.Item Dem is drunk through the ears: sound, space, and listening in Alevi collective worship ritual(2016-05) Kreger, Alexander Colin; Seeman, Sonia Tamar, 1958-; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Moin, AzfarIn Turkey, Alevi social and religious identity is often constructed in conscious opposition to institutionalized Sunni Islam. Sound is an important medium by which the relationship of violence and resistance between Alevis and the Sunni state is produced and perpetuated. This paper focuses on the ways in which Alevi aural dispositions and spatial constructions constitute and reinforce one another. These auralities and spacialities are rehearsed and disciplined within the context of collective worship rituals [cem or muhabbet], but play a broader role in molding and thus preserving the Alevi community as a religious minority under the threat of assimilation. In particular, I examine how Alevis map space by cultivating listening habits based on oppositions of interior and exterior, private and public, and esoteric and exoteric. Two Alevi concepts play especially prominent roles in regulating the relationship between sound and space. Dem refers to the divine power which resides in the words, voice, and breath of spiritually mature individuals. It is also the name for the alcohol Alevis may drink as part of their collective worship services. With the idea of dem, Alevis draw a link between listening and the acquisition of knowledge on the one hand, and drinking and interiority on the other that is embodied in the phrase “dem is drunk by the ears” [dem kulaktan içilir]. Just as tea is said to steep [demlenmek], Alevis steep—discipline themselves as Alevi subjects—during muhabbet by listening to words of wisdom spoken or sung by spiritually mature individuals. Meanwhile, dem is emplaced through its association with a face, or didar. The Alevi fixation on didar creates spatial orientations also experienced as listening vectors linking people together. Instead of facing towards Mecca while praying, Alevis face towards one another because they see God as the human being him/herself, and the beauty of God as reflected in the beauty of the human countenance. As a result, Alevi spiritual landscapes strikingly different from those of Sunni Islam, in which prayer is oriented towards a single, remote point.Item Kukeri : ritual and performance(2012-05) Veltchev, Proletina Koitcheva; Mickey, Susan E.; Lewis, AnneKukeri is a documentary film investigating the Surva tradition performed in the Pernik region of Bulgaria. The film was shot in Bulgaria, in the winter of 2011/2012, over the course of three weeks, and will be completed in August of 2012. During this creation process, I acted as the creator, director, and guide, and facilitated an artistic process that was shared with my cinematographer, Drew Xanthopoulos. Surva is a ritual performance whose purpose is to chase away evil spirits, ensure a good harvest, health, and perpetuate the life cycle: birth, death, and rebirth. Much of the performance is strictly regulated by tradition and rooted in an agrarian society that is thousands of years old. The society is quickly changing due to urbanization and globalization, and this is having drastic effects on the tradition itself. Inspired by a sense of homesickness for my Bulgarian culture, this project was a study of the transitory aspects of cultural tradition. It assayed topics of ethnography, anthropology, and folk costume, but at its root were more complex topics of the value of cultural traditions and the effects of globalization on one of the oldest rituals in the world.Item Relating with gods : investigating human-divine relationships in the prayers of Israel and Mesopotamia using a performance approach to ritual(2016-05) Davis, Ryan Conrad; Huehnergard, John; Hackett, Jo Ann; Kaplan, Jonathan; Frechette, Christopher; Lenzi, AlanThe prayers of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia are rare windows into how ancient peoples interacted with their gods. Much work has already been done to describe how social conventions are important driving factors behind these interactions with deities. In order to utilize these observations and further understand the relationships between humans and gods, it is important to understand the ritual environment in which these relationships are created. A performance approach to ritual allows us to properly contextualize the human-divine relationships that are attested in prayers within their ritual environments. In both Israel and Mesopotamia, actions within rituals take place in framed domains; because all social action occurs in framed domains as well, rituals can be profitably compared to other domains, such as theatre or sports. This dissertation uses a performance approach to analyze four different groups of prayers from the first-millennium BCE. Two groups of prayers are from Mesopotamia and are clustered around two rituals: the Akkadian šuilla and the dingiršadabba. The other two groups of prayers come from the Book of Psalms: the individual and communal laments. A performance approach allows us to talk about the rituals that utilize these prayers in two complimentary ways that are similar to how we talk about theatre in Western cultures. We can talk about a theatrical production without discussing what happens on-stage, and we can talk about what happens on-stage while ignoring off-stage elements. Because these ancient Near Eastern rituals are framed domains of action, we can talk about the domains themselves without entering inside of them, and likewise, we can talk about the world inside these domains while ignoring the world outside. This approach helps us better understand the bounded nature of the relationships that take place within ritual domains, and it helps us better understand how the domains themselves influence the relationships within them. This dissertation offers not only new ways to explore human-divine relationships but also new ways for understanding ritual efficacy in the both Israel and Mesopotamia.Item Religious hybridity in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Ana Castillo's So far from God(2011-05) Nevárez, Arturo; Lee, Julia H.; Gonzalez, John M.This master’s report presents an examination of hybridic religious practices, ritual and iconography as depicted in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Ana Castillo's So far from God. In particular, it treats the role of religious hybridity--the imbrication of folkloric, indigenous and secular traditions with orthodox Catholicism--as an important source of cultural, political and social resistance within postcolonial Chicana/o and Filipino communities that are still dealing with, or attempting to escape their colonial pasts.Item Rethinking Qawwali: perspectives of Sufism, music, and devotion in north India(2010-05) Holland, Christopher Paul; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Minault, GailScholarship has tended to focus exclusively on connections of Qawwali, a north Indian devotional practice and musical genre, to religious practice. A focus on the religious degree of the occasion inadequately represents the participant’s active experience and has hindered the discussion of Qawwali in modern practice. Through the examples of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music and an insightful BBC radio article on gender inequality this thesis explores the fluid musical exchanges of information with other styles of Qawwali performances, and the unchanging nature of an oral tradition that maintains sociopolitical hierarchies and gender relations in Sufi shrine culture. Perceptions of history within shrine culture blend together with social and theological developments, long-standing interactions with society outside of the shrine environment, and an exclusion of the female body in rituals. To better address Qawwali performances and their meanings, I foreground the perspectives of shrine social actors and how their thoughts reflect their community, its music, and gendered spaces.Item Ritual increases children's preferences for in-group members(2015-05) Wen, Nicole Jee; Legare, Cristine H.; Markman, Art BThis study examined the impact of ritual on children's in-group affiliation (N = 71, 4-11-year-old children). A novel social group paradigm was used in an afterschool program setting to test the influence of a ritual versus a control task on three key outcomes--affiliation with in-group members, expectations for inclusion by in-group members, and selective group fusion with in-group members. Results from converging measures support the hypothesis that the experience of participating in a ritual increases in-group preference to a greater degree than group activity alone. The results provide insight into the early-developing preference for in-group members and are consistent with the proposal that rituals facilitate in-group cohesion.Item Serious leisure, participation and experience in tourism: authenticity and ritual in a renaissance festival(Texas A&M University, 2005-02-17) Kim, HyounggonThis study examined the Texas Renaissance Festival as perceived and experienced by (serious) visitors for whom this was a form of regular, repeated and highly meaningful participation. Specifically, the focus was to gain understanding of the notion of serious leisure as defined by Stebbins, in the context of festivals, and to understand the meanings associated with festival participation. Following a qualitative (constructivism paradigm) research frame, the data were collected through participant observation and 37 in-depth interviews for highly committed tourists to the Texas Renaissance Festival. The collected data were analyzed through Grounded Theory techniques specified by Glaser (1978). In regard to the characteristics of participation, the results indicated that their continuous participation in the Texas Renaissance Festival displays qualities of serious leisure: 1) identification; 2) long-term career; 3) unique ethos; 4) significant personal effort; 5) perseverance; and 6) durable personal benefits. As they become more seriously involved in the festival participation, they tend to be a part of a well-integrated subculture of which prominent values include personal freedom, hedonism, and anti-materialism. The experiences constructed through the serious festival participation were reminiscent of tourism existential authenticity specified by Wang (1999) as two levels: intrapersonal authenticity (gaining one?s true self) and interpersonal authenticity (gaining true human relationship). A search of such authentic experiences at the festival seems to be partly driven by the perceived alienation in everyday life. When these aspects were examined from an interpretive and meaning-based approach, attending the festival in a serious manner is not just a simple matter of escaping from the reality (e.g., alienation) of everyday life, but is an active quest for an ?alternative? to their lives at home as many indicated. Thus, the serious participation in a tourism activity such as the Texas Renaissance Festival could be best understood as a dynamic process of attaining existential state of Being in response to diverse sociocultural conditions. Several significant theoretical propositions were made based on the results derived from this study. Additionally, marketing and management implications associated with staging tourism events and festivals were discussed.