The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language (Oxford Handbooks)

This volume brings together representative case studies and surveys that explore research into ritual language, covering theoretical and methodological approaches that reflect traditional inquiries and more recent studies. This recent literature contends that ritual language hinges on the construction of authoritative ontological models about the cosmos and its inhabitants. Ritual speech also orchestrates performances that articulate representations of collective identities, and rests on the diversity of hierarchical forms of authoritative knowledge, displayed in both oblique and direct terms. Moreover, performances, texts, and narratives associated with ritual practices are closely entwined with historical accounts that navigate current memories, recast in a diversity of ways, about ancestral beings and distant or recent pasts, or delimit a terrain in which dialectical relationships with colonial hegemony and Christian indoctrination emerge to transform the social order. Ritual narrative often offers in its structure and delivery momentous representation of the social order, social institutions, social difference, and collective identities, and may also be constituted by claims about relations among species, non-human actors, and material culture.

The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language addresses foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, use, and consequences of ritual language. The chapters examine the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social world. As the study of ritual speech hinges on extensive analyses of linguistic choices and styles, the contributors draw on data from a wide range of language groups and societies in the Americas, the Middle East, the Pacific, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean.

David Tavárez, Professor of Anthropology, Vassar College

David Tavárez is Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College. His work focuses on language and history; Indigenous intellectuals; and Native Christianities. A former Guggenheim Fellow and the co-editor of Anthropological Linguistics, he is author, co-author, or editor of five books, including the award-winning Rethinking Zapotec Time (Texas, 2022) and The Invisible War (Stanford, 2011), along with more than sixty articles and chapters.Â