Reassembling democracy: ritual as cultural resource

"This book is the result of collaborations between international researchers who have focused on diverse processes of democratic participation-and exclusion-that are intimately involved with ritual acts and complexes. The main question integrating the collection concerns the ways in which the performative qualities of ritual resources achieve their potential as forms of personal and political empowerment in our changing world. The authors seek to define the key terms "ritual" and "democracy" with reference to fieldwork-informed case studies from selected communities. They critically address democracy as a concept in a time of climate crisis, nationalism, religious re-traditionalizing, fake news and aspirational fascism. Furthermore, they discuss ways in which ritualized practices such as memorial gatherings, festivals, protest actions, pilgrimages and worship services give rise to modes of feeling, processes of representation, and patterns of interaction in which democratic explorations are given pride of place."--

0. Introduction, Graham Harvey, Michael Houseman, Sarah Pike and Jone Salomonsen -- Part One: Ritual and Democracy -- 1. Improvising ritual, Ronald L. Grimes -- 2. Hospitable democracy: Democracy and hospitality in times of crisis, Agnes Czajka -- Part Two: Re-assembling communities -- 3. Enchanting democracy: Facing the past in Mongolian shamanic rituals, Gregory Delaplace -- 4. Indigenous rituals re-make the larger than human community, Graham Harvey -- 5. Becoming autonomous together: Distanced intimacy in dances of self-discovery, Michael Houseman -- 6. Walking pilgrimages to the Marian shrine of Ft̀ima in Portugal as democratic explorations, Anna Fedele -- 7. The interreligious Choir of Civilizations: Politics of religious representation and ritual identity in Antakya (Antioch), Turkey, Jens Kreinath -- Part Three: Commemoration and resistance -- 8. The ritual powers of the weak: Democracy and public responses to the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks on Norway, Jone Salomonsen -- 9. The Flower actions: Interreligious funerals after the Uty̧a massacre, Ida Marie Hȩg -- 10. Dealing with death in contemporary Western culture: A view from afar, Marika Moisseeff -- 11. Reinvented rituals as medicine in contemporary Indigenous films: Maligluitt, Mahana, and Goldstone, Ken Derry