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Price: $27.50

Format:
Paperback 216 pp.
231 mm x 152 mm

ISBN-10:
0195301455

ISBN-13:
9780195301458

Publication date:
July 2006

Imprint: OUP US

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Rite out of Place

Ritual, Media, and the Arts

Ronald L. Grimes

We have been led to believe that rituals are well-behaved and predictable, but they sometimes behave in unpredictable ways, especially when they emerge in unexpected places. However much rites may seem to be at home in churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues, they are not captives of sacred spaces. Rituals appear on television, stare back at the lens in family photographs, slip into university classrooms, haunt the wilds, and attend movies. Rite Out of Place makes provocative discoveries by scouting out some of the unexpected places where ritualizing takes root. Most ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. Grimes writes in an accessible, engaging style, using a broad, interdisciplinary approach. This collection of seminal essays by one of the founders of the discipline appeals to anyone interested in the intersection of ritual and public life.

Readership : Students and scholars of media and communications as well as ritual studies.

Reviews

  • "This wide-ranging volume by Ronald Grimes, a distinguished interpreter of ritual, includes eleven artful and provocative reflections on rites performed outside specifically religious spaces-in popular culture, academic settings, and the natural landscape. Rite Out of Place will be useful for all those who want to think more deeply, and creatively, about the meaning and function of performance."--Thomas A. Tweed, author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion

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Ronald L. Grimes is Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He also holds the Chair of Ritual Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Deeply into the Bone, Readings in Ritual Studies, and several other books on ritual.

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Special Features

  • Provides a fresh perspective on ritual.
  • Criticizes conventional definitions and theories of ritual.
  • Links ritual with the cinematic and performing arts.
  • Grimes is a founding figure in the discipline of ritual studies.