Ritual Soundings

Ritual Soundings
Author: Sarah Weiss
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2019-03-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252051130

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The women of communities in Hindu India and Christian Orthodox Finland alike offer lamentations and mockery during wedding rituals. Catholic women of southern Italy perform tarantella on pilgrimages while Muslim Berger girls recite poetry at Moroccan weddings. Around the world, women actively claim agency through performance during such ritual events. These moments, though brief, allow them a rare freedom to move beyond culturally determined boundaries. In Ritual Soundings, Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals represent.

Ritual Innovation

Ritual Innovation
Author: Brian K. Pennington
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438469039

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Challenges prevailing conceptions of what religious ritual does and how it achieves its ends. Religious rituals are often seen as unchanging and ahistorical bearers of long-standing traditions. But as this book demonstrates, ritual is a lively platform for social change and innovation in the religions of South Asia. Drawing from Hindu and Jain examples in India, Nepal, and North America,the essays in this volume, written by renowned scholars of religion, explore how the intentional, conscious, and public invention or alteration of ritual can effect dramatic social transformation, whether in dethroning a Nepali king or sanctioning same-sex marriage. Ritual Innovation shows how the very idea of ritual as a conservative force misreads the history of religion by overlooking ritual’s inherent creative potential and its adaptability to new contexts and circumstances. “The breadth of coverage in Ritual Innovation is extraordinary and refreshing in terms of the types of contemporary ritual practices and practitioners receiving attention, not to mention the geographic spread across South Asia. This book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on South Asian religions and contemporary Hinduism.” — Karline McLain, author of The Afterlife of Sai Baba: Competing Visions of a Global Saint

Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol

Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol
Author: Judith Marie Kubicki
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1999
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9789042907409

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In this book, Sister Kubicki uses Jacques Berthier's Taize music to explore the nature of liturgical music as ritual symbol. She carries out a hermeneutical analysis of Berthier's chants and examines biographical and historical data related to the creator's of Taize music and the founding of the Taize community. The author draws on five areas of study to interpret the Taize chants as ritual symbol - symbol theory, semiotics, theologies of symbol, ritual theory, and perfomative language theory. The final chapter explores potential ecclesial meanings which may be mediated in the Taize liturgy and the role of Berthier's chants in mediating that meaning. The study concludes that it is music's symbolic property that enables it to be both ministerial and integral to the liturgy. As symbolic activity, music-making evokes participation, negotiates relationships, and enables the assembly to orient themselves and to find their identity and place within their world. Furthermore, music-making provides the illocutionary force to "do something" in the act of singing. Thus it is that as part of a complexus of ritual symbols, music interacts with other symbols, in mediating the liturgy's meaning.

Deeply Into the Bone

Deeply Into the Bone
Author: Ronald L. Grimes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2002-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520236750

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Providing a personal, informed and cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this text illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions.

Efficacious Engagement

Efficacious Engagement
Author: Kimberly Hope Belcher
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814680410

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The long-standing tradition of baptizing infants suggests that the sacraments plunge our bodies into salvation, so the revelation of God's love in the sacraments addresses the whole person, not the mind alone. In this work, the contemporary Roman Catholic rite of baptism for infants becomes a case study, manifesting the connections between the human body, the ecclesial body, and the Body of Christ. The sacramental life, for children as for adults, is an ongoing journey deeper into the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By examining the church's practice of infant baptism, Kimberly Hope Belcher asks how human beings participate in God's life through the sacraments. Christian sacraments are embodied, cultural rituals performed by and for human beings. At the same time, the sacraments are God's gifts of grace, by which human beings enter into God's own life. In this study, contemporary ritual studies, sacramental theology, and trinitarian theology are used to explore how participation in the sacraments can be an efficacious engagement in God's life of love. Kimberly Hope Belcher is an assistant professor of theology at Saint John's University, where she teaches sacramental theology and ritual studies. She is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy and writes for the liturgical blog Pray Tell.

Sound States

Sound States
Author: Adalaide Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2018-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469647753

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By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life. The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poames, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements--statements held only partially in check by meaning. The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Ritual Words and Narrative Worlds in the Book of Leviticus

Ritual Words and Narrative Worlds in the Book of Leviticus
Author: Bryan D. Bibb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567513033

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This book argues that literary features and ritual dynamics within the book of Leviticus enlighten each other. The first two chapters establish that one may read Leviticus as a coherent literary work and define the genre of Leviticus as "narrativized ritual," a complex blending of descriptive narrative and prescriptive ritual. In conversation with Catherine Bell, they present several aspects of the text that are ritualized and show how this ritualization implies a negotiation of power relations among participants. The third and fourth chapters examine the first half of Leviticus, both the legal sections in Lev. 1-7 and 11-15 and the narratives in Lev. 8-10 and 16. These sections alternate between establishing the ritual system and exposing gaps and ambiguities in that system.Chapter 5 turns to the second half of Leviticus, traditionally called the Holiness Code. The ritual language found in this section is less formal and precise, mirroring the way in which the concept of holiness is expanded and extended to the whole people. As this material concludes the book, it relativizes and democratizes the strict ritual system contained in the first half.

Efficacy of Sound

Efficacy of Sound
Author: Ruthie Meadows
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2023-11-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226828948

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The first book-length ethnographic study on music and Ifá divination in Cuba and Nigeria. Hailing from Cuba, Nigeria, and various sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, Ifá missionary-practitioners are transforming the landscape of Ifá divination and deity (òrìṣà/oricha) worship through transatlantic travel and reconnection. In Cuba, where Ifá and Santería emerged as an interrelated, Yorùbá-inspired ritual complex, worshippers are driven to “African traditionalism” by its promise of efficacy: they find Yorùbá approaches more powerful, potent, and efficacious. In the first book-length study on music and Ifá, Ruthie Meadows draws on extensive, multisited fieldwork in Cuba and Yorùbáland, Nigeria, to examine the controversial “Nigerian-style” ritual movement in Cuban Ifá divination. Meadows uses feminist and queer of color theory along with critical studies of Africanity to excavate the relation between utility and affect within translocal ritual music circulations. Meadows traces how translocal Ifá priestesses (ìyánífá), female batá drummers (bataleras), and priests (babaláwo) harness Yorùbá-centric approaches to ritual music and sound to heighten efficacy, achieve desired ritual outcomes, and reshape the conditions of their lives. Within a contentious religious landscape marked by the idiosyncrasies of revolutionary state policy, Nigerian-style Ifá-Òrìṣà is leveraged to transform femininity and masculinity, state religious policy, and transatlantic ritual authority on the island.

Sounding Indigenous

Sounding Indigenous
Author: M. Bigenho
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113711813X

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Sounding Indigenous explores the relations between music, people, and places through analysis of Bolivian music performances: by a non-governmental organization involved in musical activities, by a music performing ensemble, and by the people living in two rural areas of Potosi. Based on research conducted between 1993 and 1995, the book frames debates of Bolivian national and indigenous identities in terms of different attitudes people assume towards cultural and artistic authenticity. The book makes unique contributions through an emphasis on music as sensory experience, through its theorization of authenticity in relation to music, through its combined focus on different kinds of Bolivian music (indigenous, popular, avant-garde), through its combined focus on music performance and the Bolivian nation, and through its interpretation of local, national, and transnational fieldwork experiences.

The Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Mark
Author: Charles A. Bobertz
Publisher: Baker Academic
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-10-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1493405713

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How Baptism and the Eucharist Shaped Early Christian Understandings of Jesus Long before the Gospel writers put pen to papyrus, the earliest Christians participated in the powerful rituals of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which fundamentally shaped their understanding of God, Christ, and the world in which they lived. In this volume, a respected biblical scholar and teacher explores how cultural anthropology and ritual studies elucidate ancient texts. Charles Bobertz offers a liturgical reading of the Gospel of Mark, arguing that the Gospel is a narrative interpretation of early Christian ritual. This fresh, responsible, and creative proposal will benefit scholars, professors, and students. Its ecclesial and pastoral ramifications will also be of interest to church leaders and pastors.