Throughout human history, and across many religious cultures, offerings are made into fire. The essays collected in Homa Variations provide detailed studies of this practice, known in the tantric world as the "homa," from its inception up to the present.

Throughout human history, and across many religious cultures, offerings are made into fire. The essays collected in 'Homa Variations' provide detailed studies of this practice, known in the tantric world as the 'homa, ' from its inception up to the present.

Rites of the God-King offers a critical revision of mainstream Hinduism from the perspective of the life of a single ritual from medieval India. Drawing theoretical connections to modern ethnographies, it raises questions about the nature of kingship and priesthood, image-worship, and ritual change.

The Kenya Gazette is an official publication of the government of the Republic of Kenya. It contains notices of new legislation, notices required to be published by law or policy as well as other announcements that are published for general public information. It is published every week, usually on Friday, with occasional releases of special or supplementary editions within the week.

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders, Nurit Stadler shows, religious minorities lay claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler explores the rise of these rituals, their focus on the body, female materiality, and their place in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Stadler examines the varied features of the practice and implications of the rituals, looking at themes of femininity and material experience. She considers the role of the body in rituals that represent the act of birth or the circle of life and that aim to foster an intimate connection between the female saint and her worshippers. Stadler underscores the political, cultural, and spatial elements of this practice, bringing attention to how religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze, among others) have utilized these rituals to assert their right to the land. Voices of the Ritual offers a valuable assessment of religious ritual practice that encrypts female themes into a landscape that has historically been defined by war and conflict.

"The book explores the ritual geography of a pilgrimage system woven around medieval local saints in Norway, and the renaissance of pilgrimage in contemporary majority Protestant Norway, facing challenges of migration, xenophobia, and climate crisis. The study is concerned with historical narratives and communal contemporary reinterpretations of the figure of St. Olav, the first Christian king who was a major impulse towards conversion to Christianity and the unification of regions of Norway in a nation unified by a Christian law and faith. This initially medieval pilgrimage network, originated after the death of Olav Haraldsson and his proclamation as saint in 1030, became repressed after the Reformation which had a great influence on Scandinavia and shaped Norwegian Christianity overwhelmingly. Since the late 1990s, the Church of Norway participated in a renaissance that has grown into a remarkable infrastructure supported by national and local authorities. The contemporary pilgrimage by land and by sea to Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim is one site where this negotiation is paramount. The study maps how both pilgrims, hosts, church officials and government officials are renegotiating and reshaping narratives of landscape, sacrality, pilgrimage as a symbol of life journey, nation, identity, Christianity, and Protestant reflections on the durability of medieval Catholic saints. The redevelopment of this instance of pilgrimage in a majority Protestant context negotiates various societal concerns, all of which are addressed by various groups of pilgrims or other actors in the network. One part of the network is the annual festival Olavsfest, a culture and music festival that actively and critically engages the contested heritage of St. Olav and the Church of Norway through theater, music, lectures, and discussions, and features theological and interreligious conversations. This festival is a platform for creative and critical engagement with the contested, violent heritage of St. Olav, the colonial history of Norway in relation to the Sami indigenous population, and many other contemporary social and religious issues. The study highlights facets of critical, constructive engagement of these majority Protestant actors engaging legacy through forms of theological and ritual creativity rather than mere repetition"--

History in the Soviet Union was a political project. From the Soviet perspective, Buryats, an indigenous Siberian ethnic group, were a "backwards" nationality that was carried along on the inexorable march towards the Communist utopian future. When the Soviet Union ended, the Soviet version of history lost its power and Buryats, like other Siberian indigenous peoples, were able to revive religious and cultural traditions that had been suppressed by the Soviet state. In the process, they also recovered knowledge about the past that the Soviet Union had silenced. Borrowing the analytic lens of the chronotope from Bakhtin, Quijada argues that rituals have chronotopes which situate people within time and space. As they revived rituals, Post-Soviet Buryats encountered new historical information and traditional ways of being in time that enabled them to re-imagine the Buryat past, and what it means to be Buryat. Through the temporal perspective of a reincarnating Buddhist monk, Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov, Buddhists come to see the Soviet period as a test on the path of dharma. Shamanic practitioners, in contrast, renegotiate their relationship to the past by speaking to their ancestors through the bodies of shamans. By comparing the versions of history that are produced in Buddhist, shamanic and civic rituals, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets offers a new lens for analyzing ritual, a new perspective on how an indigenous people grapples with a history of state repression, and an innovative approach to the ethnographic study of how people know about the past.

A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Research 2016" that was published in IJMS

The discipline of religious studies has historically tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes occurring in the context of individual performances as outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies; scholars have largely overlooked the extensive discussions of ritual mistakes that exist in the religious literature of indigenous traditions. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Offering a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.