What happens in religious traditions when the nature of the ritual is questioned, but the practice of performing rituals is not itself abandoned? How is it that people can accomplish ritual successfully without belief, and even without attributing any meaning to it? This book draws on the authors' observations of such reactions among Jains in western India, and asks what they can tell us about ritual as a mode of human action. Most anthropologists have assumed that ritual is a special kind of happening. The authors argue that we should not define ritual as a distinct type of event but instead look at ritualization, which is a modification of action. What is distinctive about actions which are ritualized? This book proposes a new theory to analyse the qualities which ritualization gives to a wide and disparate range of actions and events. The authors reject the common view that ritual carries intrinsic meaning, and stress the reasons why participants may or may not give meaning to ritual acts. They draw on insights from the philosophy of action, cognitive psychology, and phenomenology, to explore the paradox that in ritual, actors both are and are not the authors of their acts. The book explores the implications for anthropology of this new theory of ritual, with discussions of the relation between texts and action, the importance of bodily experience in ritual enactment, and the sense of selfhood as it is affected by ritual.

The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Politics & Social Sciences

Laidlaw, James

Humphrey, Caroline

Anthropology

Oxford University Press

This work is a ground breaking study of Mongolian shamanism and society, past and present. Lavishly illustrated and containing a wealth of new information, it presents a fresh understanding of the widespread phenomenon of shamanism. It looks at gender and ritual, female shamans and goddess worship, death and funeral rituals, the importance of old men and ancestors, and Daur notions of landscape within their direct experience and beyond.

Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Humphrey and Laidlaw present a new and radical general theory of ritual by drawing on an ethnographically rich account of the ritual worship of the Jains of western India. Ritual, they argue, is not a logically separate type of activity, but rather a quality that can be attributed to a wide range of everyday activities. In exploring the issue of what is distinctive about actions which are ritualized, this book makes an ambitious and controversial contribution to social and religious anthropology.

Clarendon Press

A Monastery in Time is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery—the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia—from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural Revolution, Caroline Humphrey and Hürelbaatar Ujeed tell a story of religious formation, suppression, and survival over a history that spans three centuries. Often overlooked in Buddhist studies, Mongolian Buddhism is an impressively self-sustaining tradition whose founding lama, the Third Mergen Gegen, transformed Tibetan Buddhism into an authentic counterpart using the Mongolian language. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Humphrey and Ujeed show how lamas have struggled to keep Mergen Gegen’s vision alive through tremendous political upheaval, and how such upheaval has inextricably fastened politics to religion for many of today’s practicing monks. Exploring the various ways Mongolian Buddhists have attempted to link the past, present, and future, Humphrey and Ujeed offer a compelling study of the interplay between the individual and the state, tradition and history.

A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism

Ujeed, Hurelbaatar

University of Chicago Press

Social Sciences

Looks at the different ways the worlds religions translate their beliefs into architecture, and discusses site selection, feng shui, celestial alignments, and consecration

Sacred Architecture (Living Wisdom Series)

Arts & Photography

Vitebsky, Piers

Architecture

Little,Brown & Co

When it appeared in 1983, Caroline Humphrey's Karl Marx Collective was the first detailed study of the Soviet collective farm system. Through careful ethnographic work on two collective farms operated in Buryat communities in Siberia, the author presented an absorbing--if dispiriting--account of the actual functioning of a planned economy at the local level. Now this classic work is back in print in a revised edition that adds new material from the author's most recent research in the former Soviet Union. In two new chapters she documents what has happened to the two farms in the collapsing Russian economy. She finds that collective farms are still the dominant agricultural forms, not out of nostalgic sentiment or loyalty to the Soviet ideal, but from economic and political necessity. Today the collectives are based on households and small groups coming together out of choice. There have been important resurgences in "traditional" thinking about kinship, genealogy, shamanism and mountain cults; and yet all of this is newly formed by its attempt to deal with post-Soviet realities. Marx Went Away will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. "The book should be on the shelf of every student of Soviet affairs." --Times Literary Supplement Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Marx Went Away - but Karl Stayed Behind

Business & Money

Economics

University of Michigan Press

When it appeared in 1983, Caroline Humphrey's Karl Marx Collective was the first detailed study of the Soviet collective farm system. Through careful ethnographic work on two collective farms operated in Buryat communities in Siberia, the author presented an absorbing--if dispiriting--account of the actual functioning of a planned economy at the local level.Now this classic work is back in print in a revised edition that adds new material from the author's most recent research in the former Soviet Union. In two new chapters she documents what has happened to the two farms in the collapsing Russian economy. She finds that collective farms are still the dominant agricultural forms, not out of nostalgic sentiment or loyalty to the Soviet ideal, but from economic and political necessity.Today the collectives are based on households and small groups coming together out of choice. There have been important resurgences in "traditional" thinking about kinship, genealogy, shamanism and mountain cults; and yet all of this is newly formed by its attempt to deal with post-Soviet realities.Marx Went Away will appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology."The book should be on the shelf of every student of Soviet affairs." --Times Literary SupplementCaroline Humphrey is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Marx Went Away-But Karl Stayed Behind: Karl Marx Collective, Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm

History

Americas

Univ of Michigan Pr

Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 40)

Cambridge University Press

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