Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford Ritual Studies) - Softcover

Tomlinson, Matt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199341141 ISBN 13: 9780199341146

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, Ritual Textuality presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Tomlinson has conducted anthropological research in Fiji since 1996, focusing on the intersections of culture, language, ritual, and politics. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2002, he taught at Bowdoin College, and then became a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Anthropology at The Australian National University in Canberra.

Review

"The product of long experience with Fijian life, closely observed, this volume brings together an impressively diverse range of phenomena. With clear and direct prose, Tomlinson sorts through the complexities of religion and politics to offer us a compelling and original theory of ritual." --Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan

"In Ritual Textuality, Matt Tomlinson presents a provocative study of varieties of ritual performance in contemporary Fiji, one that resonates with seminal anthropological works that have explored how ritual patterns establish and reproduce religious authority... His insightful analysis reveals a method of locating language ideology in several contexts, and demonstrates for the Fijian case how ritual performance articulates with structures of power." --Pacific Affairs

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0199341141
• ISBN 13: 9780199341146
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 188