Recasting Ritual explores how ritual behaviour changes in response to varying cultural, political and physical contexts. The contributors from Spain, Sweden, Norway and the UK examine how globalization and technology affect ritual performance.
Wide ranging examples based on original research from the Pacific, Europe, East and West Africa, Latin America and Indonesia illustrate the relationships between ritual and social identity.
These include:
* how married Muslim women in Kenya admire new brides in a style influenced by US soap operas
* how the Olympic Winter Games in Norway contrasted the femininity of the athletic cross-country skier with the fragile figure skater
* how shoulder callouses from carrying statues in rituals are a prestigious form of identity for Catholic men in Malta.
The book includes a thorough introduction which puts the chapters in context and brings out their implications and importance for anthropology.

How can media and performance studies take a place in the discipline of anthropology?
IRitual, Performance, Media demonstrates how individual inventiveness makes society a process of dynamic interaction between creativity and convention. Human beings perform their roles in accordance with the context of the situation--be it in theater, dance, or rites such as spirit invocation or pilgrimages--yet continue to creatively devise ways of extending their engagement with the situation. Case studies of human behavior in relation to contexts in which reality is more than that of everyday routines shows how people continue to actively construct the world in which they live, for the purpose of personal satisfaction and social advantage.

In this book, contributors drawn from a range of backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and social psychology explore different ways of practising feminism and their effect on gendered identities. The contributors examine: feminism and gender differences between different countries; various diverse feminist practices; the call for recognition of heterosexuality as a politicized identity; the practical role of feminism in nationalist struggles; and methodological implications of feminist practices. They show women to be different, and that different structural influences come into play to make them different. But women are not so different that a feminist politics is invalid. the text should be a useful contribution to the middle-ground between post-modern deconstructions of difference and identity, and continued feminist concern with grounded power relations and the validity of experience.

In this book, contributors drawn from a range of backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and social psychology explore different ways of practising feminism and their effect on gendered identities. The contributors examine: feminism and gender differences between different countries; various diverse feminist practices; the call for recognition of heterosexuality as a politicized identity; the practical role of feminism in nationalist struggles; and methodological implications of feminist practices. They show women to be different, and that different structural influences come into play to make them different. But women are not so different that a feminist politics is invalid. the text should be a useful contribution to the middle-ground between post-modern deconstructions of difference and identity, and continued feminist concern with grounded power relations and the validity of experience.

Contents:
1. Cultural Creativity on Stage 2. Rituals of Concheros Indians in Mexico 3. Christian Pilgrimages to Walsingham 4. Rituals in Shrines in Benin and Nigeria 5. Bullfighting in Cordoba 6. The Performance of the Welsh National Eisteddfod 7. Television in Bali and Ballet Performance

"The book is carefully constructed...we can learn a lot from it which] may well be due to its robust empiricism." . Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale

"This book attempts a much more comprehensive consideration of dance in its cultural, social, and historical contexts than most and the author should be commended not only for this ambitious approach but also for keeping ethnographic method as the foundation of the research... the world of dance scholarship, anthropology, performance studies, and Indonesian studies are the better for this book which is, in important ways, remarkable." . American Ethnologist

"This is a valuable addition to the literature on performance in Southeast Asia, on dance history, and on culture change in general ... a very timely and important work ... the quality of its prose, the depth of research involved make it a unique contribution to dance scholarship." . Helene Bouvier, CNRS, Paris

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.

Felicia Hughes-Freeland is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is a Reader in Anthropology, Dept of Geography, School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University. She has done extensive research in Indonesia on Javanese dance over a period of nearly thirty years and her articles have been widely published. Her edited books and ethnographic films include Ritual, Performance, Media and The Dancer and the Dance."

Recasting Ritual explores how ritualized action diversifies in response to varying cultural, political and physical contexts. The contributors look at how issues such as globalisation and technology affect ritual performance and how minorities often utilise performances to affirm their own identites while also speaking to outsiders.
The contributors examine the relationship between ritual meaning and social identity through case-studies drawn from the Pacific, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Indonesia, and East and West Africa. Study of the theoretical underpinnings of social action affirms the independence of anthropology as a discipline from cultural, media and performance studies, according it a distinctive role in elucidating contemporary and emergent human conditions.

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.