Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at USC’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment. He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain. Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.

Several moons hang low over the islands of Aguaterre within the Great Volcanic Ring, where earthquakes, volcanoes and roiling sea make for a rough existence. But the world is changing, the political landscape is shifting, many dangers approach but people have secret hopes for something better. Garrison, beaten and berated, knows there’s more to life than the chores of the farm and forge, and abuse from his blacksmithing father. Ellinvale, trapped in a walled estate within a walled city, chafes at the time-honoured tradition of matchmaking that limits her future as a woman. The Dragon King, protected in his high tower, studies the impassable Churn, a long swath of frothy ocean that likes to smash his ships to pieces against the jagged rocks of the Maw. He needs to send battalions of Amphibians across the Churn if he is to achieve his ambition—to reign over the world. When Garrison sets out alone on a special trip beyond Crossroads to deliver his father’s wares, it puts them all on a path of convergence that could change the course of their futures. The Ritual is the first book in the Chronicles of Garrison series. At its core, it’s a story of good versus evil, the strength of friendship and the discovery that there is power within.

Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at USC’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment. He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain. Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.

Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, and festivals that emphasize specificity and create feelings of belonging between members of families, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups, and nations, and interpret them from a perspective of area, state, and cultural policies. A closer look at post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts shows that opportunities to perform ethnic culture vary significantly among Russian minorities with different histories and administrative organisation. Within this variation the dialogue between local and administrative needs is decisive.

In "The Rats in the Walls" by H.P. Lovecraft, a man restores his ancestral estate in England, only to be haunted by mysterious noises within the walls. As he investigates, he uncovers horrifying secrets about his family's dark past and the ancient horrors lurking beneath the mansion.

A fascinating account of how the law determines or dismantles identity and personhood Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.

Indian indigenous societies are especially known for their elaborate rituals, which offer an excellent chance for studying religion as practice. However, few detailed ethnographic works exist on the ritual practices of these societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand, India this book offers insights into contemporary, previously not described rituals of the Santal, one of the largest indigenous societies of Central India. Its focus lies on culturally specific notions of place as articulated and created during these rituals. In three chapters the book discusses how the Santal "make place" on different local, regional and global levels through their rituals: They reaffirm their ancestral roots in their land during large sacrificial rituals. They offer sacrifices to the dangerous deities of the forest in exchange for rain. And they claim their region to be a "Santal region" through large festivals celebrated in sacred groves, which they link to national and global discourses of indigeneity and environmentalism. Through an analysis of the rituals of a specific society, this book addresses broader issues. It presents an example of how to study religion as a practical activity. It portrays culture-specific perceptions of the environment. And last, the book underlines the potential that lies in choosing place as a lens to study social phenomena in context.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion provides a comprehensive overview by period and region of the relevant archaeological material in relation to theory, methodology, definition, and practice. Although, as the title indicates, the focus is upon archaeological investigations of ritual and religion, by necessity ideas and evidence from other disciplines are also included, among them anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, and history. The Handbook covers a global span - Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and the Americas - and reaches from the earliest prehistory (the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic) to modern times. In addition, chapters focus upon relevant themes, ranging from landscape to death, from taboo to water, from gender to rites of passage, from ritual to fasting and feasting. Written by over sixty specialists, renowned in their respective fields, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will serve both as a comprehensive introduction to its subject and as a stimulus to further research.

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.