New Publication on Democracy and Ritual from ISSRNC Scholars

We’re excited to share news about a new edited volume on democracy and ritual that features work from several scholars in the ISSRNC network. The book is available for anyone to read thanks to its publication as an open access title.

The new book is called Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource (Bloomsburg, 2020) and is edited by Jone Salomonsen, Michael Houseman, Sarah Pike, and Graham Harvey. Here’s a brief summary of the book from the publisher:

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.

You can access the book online at the Bloomsbury Open collection page right here.

Congratulations to these scholars on an exciting new publication!