Harrassowitz

Body, performance, agency, and experience. (CD-ROM included)

Five volumes present the proceeding of the Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual conference, in Heidelberg September-October 2008. This second volume contains 34 papers on ritual and agency; ritual, performance, and event; the body and food in ritual; and the varieties of ritual experience. Among the topics are shifting agencies in Brazilian Umbanda rituals, representation of female figures of musicians in Greek Sicily from the sixth to the third centuries BC, awkwardness in mortuary rituals for body donors, living through ritual in the face of death, evolutionary origins of human ritual, and performing grief in formal and informal rituals at the Burning Man Festival. No index is provided. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Grammars and morphologies of ritual practices in Asia. (CD-ROM included)

This is the first of five volumes that form the proceedings of the conference. The 28 papers look in turn at grammar and morphology of ritual, and at ritual discourse and ritual performance in China and Japan. Among the topics are formal structure and self-referential loops in Vedic ritual, the use of binomials in Rai invocations, the meta-pragmatics of Tantric rites in Kerala, interpretations of Confucian ritual in Chinese scholarly discussions in the 11th century, esoteric Buddhist eye-healing rituals in Japan and the promotion of benefits, and the life of images in Daoist ritual. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Reflexivity, media, and visuality. (CD-ROM included)

Five volumes document the international conference Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, held in Heidelberg, Germany in September-October 2008. This fourth volume contains sections on reflexivity and discourse on ritual, ritual and media, ritual and visuality, and ritual design. The 35 papers include discussions of patterns of reflexivity in pre-modern Chinese discourses on ritual, ritual and reflectivity in the sociological discourse of modernity, time and the Other in Moroccan rituals of possession, the dynamic praise of gods as represented and prescribed by ancient Egyptian ritual texts, and cases from contemporary Sweden of designing rites to re-enchant secularized society. The accompanying disk contains an electronic version of the book in PDF format. There is no index (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

State, power, and violence. (CD-ROM included)

This is one of five volumes collecting the proceedings of the international conference "Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual," held in Heidelberg, Germany in September-October of 2008 and bringing together ritual studies researchers from around the world to explore the latest interdisciplinary research. Forty presentations from four of the panels of the conference are included, with the panels addressing ritual and violence, rituals of power and consent, usurping ritual, and state and ritual in India. A few examples of specific topics include: the ritual use of linguistic and textual violence in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East, the performance of violence and humiliation at the Abu Ghraib prison in American-occupied Iraq, imperial sanctity and politico-ecclesiastical propaganda in Byzantium, performative and literary alienations of ritual excommunication, and ritual and state legitimacy in Orissa in colonial India. Two of the articles are in German, while the rest are in English. The CD-ROM contains a PDF version of the text. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Transfer and spaces. (CD-ROM included)

This collection of essays is the fifth volume in the Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual series, and represents papers delivered at a conference by the same name in 2008 at the Ritual Dynamics Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. The collection is divided into two parts. The first looks at the rituals of transfer (marriage, trade, Eucharist, Pentacost) and the innovation of rituals (a kind of transfer) in the context of changing socio-political and geographic circumstances. The second section considers the ritual function of space in terms of architecture, sound production, mobility and visual presentation. The essays are multidisciplinary and multimethodological in approach, and often transcultural in their subject. The contributors are professors, doctoral candidates and research fellows from around the world, with backgrounds in economics, art history, archaeology, Christian history and theology, area studies, sociology and anthropology, and religious studies. The major drawback of the volume is two-fold: there is no index and no editorial introduction, though a collection of abstracts in the back makes up somewhat. The individual essays contain their own notes and citations though, and a PDF version of the book is available on a CD included in the very back, which is searchable. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Views of the dark valley; Japanese cinema and the culture of nationalism, 1937-1945.

This work explores the production of Japanese cinema during the "dark valley" (kurai tanima) period, as the World War II years are sometimes described. The author focuses on how the development of Japanese cinema interacted with government efforts to create a particular culture of nationalism. The discussion is pursued from two angles, the ways in which bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education, the Home Ministry and other institutions came to perceive cinema as a key tool for integrating the Japanese population into the nationalist project and the subsequent policies towards the motion picture business, as well as the mental attitudes and symbolic resources as perceived in the films and as revealed in government promotion practices and which films were given the highest distinctions for their cultural contribution. Cited price is converted from euros and subject to change. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)