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Eds. by Pamela J. Stewart, and Andrew J. Strathern. 2022. The Palgrave Handbook 

of Anthropological Ritual Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, 395 pp, ISBN 978-3-030-

76824-9  

 

Keywords: ritual; ritualization; performance; religion; cultural creativity.  

 

This volume engages in the varied and complex field of ritual practices, with a special 

focus on religious rituals. The work contributes to the field’s vitality with original 

approaches emerging directly from data collected from a great variety of contexts. The 

contributions combine critical overviews of theoretical and methodological approaches 

and in-depth ethnographic research. Ritual and other key concepts, such as performance, 

sacrifice, religion, magic and sport, are complicated through a variety of viewpoints, 

methods and ethnographic data. Particular emphasis is given to ritual’s dynamism, 

historical processes, and to the complex relationship between continuity, creativity, 

adaptability, cross-contextual influences, imposition and individual agency. 

 

The book is divided into four parts. In the introductory chapter, Andrew Strathern and 

Pamela Stewart trace a critical overview of ritual studies, pointing out the dynamic 

between continuity and change, and explore main themes and less-studied aspects of 

rituals, such as concealment, “absent rituals,” failure, contestation and negotiation. The 

first part presents new perspectives on established themes in ritual studies. In Chapter 2, 

Roger Ivan Lohmann considers charismatic Christian practices of dream sharing in Papua 

New Guinea as a form of reproducing and democratising charisma. Through a 

combination of synchronic and diachronic analysis, he shows the articulation of 

enthusiasm and stability in religious services as well as ruptures and continuity with 

traditional religious practices. In Chapter 3, Günther Schörner develops a critical 

overview of theoretical approaches and historical, anthropological and archaeological 

sources on sacrifice, expanding beyond animal killing. The chapter explores aspects such 



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as performativity, language, meaning, aim, aesthetic and emotional experience, human 

and more-than-human relationships, as well as the contextualization of rituals in 

historical, cultural, social and environmental settings. In Chapter 4, Thomas Widlok 

analyses how a better understanding of the wider spectrum of economic transfers can 

improve our understanding of religions and rituals, using the key concept of sharing as a 

form of dealing with asymmetries among humans and between humans and other beings 

and forces. He also explores sharing in ritual and religious practices both in egalitarian 

and hierarchical societies, such as the San of Southern African and the Catholic Church, 

and its interconnections with economic processes, social and political relationships and 

daily life practices. Based on ethnographic research on prophetic churches in Angola, in 

Chapter 5, Ruy Llera Blanes examines how ritualised acts of cortesia (courtesy) are rife 

with ambiguity, since they are used not only to express hospitality, but also produce a 

sense of foreignness, distinction and separation from (internal and foreign) others and 

confirms hierarchical positions. These acts inform aesthetic, bodily and social 

interactions, and are connected with traditional values, historical processes and politics. 

In Chapter 6, Nigel Rapport analyses how the creation and performance of personal rituals 

furnish a sense of “home,” a comfortably informal, personal lifeworld, security and 

familiarity, as well as an anchorage for personal identity in situations of mobility, such as 

migration and work. Key concepts include “ritual consciousness,” that “concerns the 

particular, subjective way in which a kind of reiteration and transcendence is thought and 

felt by a particular individual” (p.124), reflectivity, intentionality, instrumentality, and a 

private and internal dimension of thought and feeling. In Chapter 7, John W. Traphagan 

offers an insight into sport as a ritualised social and physical space in which normative 

values of society, masculinity, identity and power relationships can be performed, 

embodied, regulated, imprinted, contested and negotiated. In Chapter 8, Andrew J. 

Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart explore language and cognition in ritual practices, 

focusing on performance, communication, meaning, sensory impacts, feelings, 

embodiment, metaphor, abduction and prehension. They also analyse how change can 

take place, how rituals can be transferred from one context to another or adapt to new 

situations, and new meanings that can be attributed to old rituals. 

 

The second part of the book explores healing rituals. In Chapter 9, Anne Kjærsgaard and 

Eric Venbrux analyse rituals centering on grave-visiting in Northwestern Europe and 

show how people deal with the complex transition from life to death, cope with loss and 



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memory and maintain interactions with the (un)dead, in connection with cemeteries’ 

architecture and regulations. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in the multiethnic 

society of Inner Mongolia, in Chapter 10, Saijirahu Buyanchugla explores shamanic 

healing rituals and the conceptions that sustain them, ancestral communication, the 

process of becoming a shaman and medical pluralism, and shows how common principles 

sustain both biomedicine and complementary and alternative medicines. In Chapter 11, 

Anne Sigfrid Grønseth examines religious ritual practices as a dynamic space for 

negotiating and configuring identity, belonging and well-being for transnational migrants 

and refugees in a context of discrimination, vulnerability, uncertainty and risk. Her 

approach centres on empathic face-to-face encounters in everyday life, embodiment, 

sensorial experience, imagination and emotions.  

 

The volume’s third part is devoted to cultural intimacy and innovation. In Chapetr 12, 

Sanjoy and Shampa Mazumdar explore a Hindu home-temple in California focusing on 

the role of ambience, physical and spatial elements, the materiality and immateriality of 

architecture, experiential and emotional components in ritual and the multisensoriality of 

sacred engagement. Employing Clifford Geertz’s view of rituals as models of and models 

for society, in Chapter 13, Anne-Christine Hornborg critically analyses new individual-

centred ritualised therapeutic and coaching practices in Sweden that promise to develop 

inner potential, authenticity, renewal and success in life and at work, as well as their 

insertion into the market, legitimacy and communication strategies, the distribution of 

moral responsibility when rituals fail and the risk of transforming social criticism into 

self-criticism. Based on long-term fieldwork on walking pilgrimages to the Marian shrine 

of Fátima in Portugal and on Mary Magdalene pilgrimages influenced by Goddess 

spirituality, in Chapter 14, Anna Fedele explores “ritual crafting,” and creative ritual 

forms of dealing with experiences of vulnerability, through an approach based on lived 

religion, embodiment, materiality, intimacy and a focus on smaller, ephemeral rituals 

aside from official celebrations. 

 

The fourth part is devoted to comparative studies of ritual practices. In Chapter 15, Garry 

W. Trompf offers a critical survey of literature on sorcery and witchcraft through an 

interdisciplinary approach, paying special attention to social dynamics, changing 

conditions, patterns of belief, power, conflict, context, internal logic and technical 

repertory. He also explores continuities and discontinuities of sorcery and witchcraft in 



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Papua New Guinea after social and cultural changes and the spread of a Christian 

revivalist movement. In Chapter 16, through a comparative study in Sweden, England, 

the United States and Nigeria, Simon Coleman shows less-explored aspects of 

Pentecostalism, such as the problematic nature of the concept of ritual, conversion and 

distinction from otherness, ruptures and continuities with respect to previous traditions, 

the articulation of sacred experience with everyday life, porosity, partiality and the 

believers’ combination of elements from different traditions. In Chapter 17, Jens Kreinath 

develops the concept of interrituality, through keen observation of devotional practices 

at sacred sites shared by Orthodox Christians and Arab Alawites in Turkey, highlighting 

similarities in ritual postures, gestures, movements, the aesthetics of sensory perceptions 

and other forms of entering into a relationship with sacred objects and places, as an 

expression of the dynamics of interreligious relations and the ability of rituals to interact 

with other rituals and different social institutions. In Chapter 18, Pamela J. Stewart and 

Andrew J. Strathern explore change and continuity in ceremonial exchanges of wealth 

and goods, and death rituals in Papua New Guinea, in a situation marked by social 

transformations, competition, conflict (often expressed in terms of witchcraft), precarity 

and fear. The building of and care for elaborated gravesites became the locus of 

expression of wealth, social status, political relationships, competitions, alliances and 

economic transactions. In the Epilogue, Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart 

examine changes and adaptations in religious and daily ritual practices during the Covid-

19 pandemic, with the surge of digital communication in everyday life and restrictions on 

movements and gatherings. 

 

In sum, this collection is a precious tool for researchers and students from various 

disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology, religious studies, among others) interested 

in rituals and religion, as well as other specific topics (such as sacrifice, healing, sport, 

hospitality, pilgrimages, memory and materiality) analysed in individual chapters.  

  

Daniela Calvo is a cultural anthropologist who received her PhD in Social Sciences 

from the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is a member of NUER – Nucleus of the 

Study of Religion of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, of CETRAB – Center of 

Afro-Brazilian Traditions, and the IUAES Commission on Anthropology of Pandemics. 

She has conducted ethnographic research in Traditional African and African-Derived 

Religions in Brazil and Italy, with a focus on healing rituals, food and gender 



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relationships, sacred space, more-than-human relationships, and the impact of and 

reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.  

 

 

 

© 2023 Daniela Calvo 

 


