The political instrumentalization of ritual performances is as old as ritual itself. The contributors to this panel present a variety of cases in which rituals are created or reshaped to propagate national ideologies and to rehabilitate those whom civil institutions have marginalized.
This paper presents how Hajj, as one of the five pillars of Islam, modified and became a political ritual with aggressive aspects that represent political and sectarian conflicts and struggles between Saudi Arabia and Iran at both structural and individual levels in post-revolution of 1979. Theoretically, the paper is based on new formulation of political ritual concept and methodologically, it is based on content analysis of speeches, photos, open messages and Hajj costumes for Iranian pilgrims.
This paper argues that early American civil defense drills, large-scale rehearsals for nuclear war performed in cities across the United States, are usefully interpreted as rituals inscribing new nuclear metaphysics. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) operated with the stated goal of preparing the nation for surviving atomic attack, even as planners privately acknowledged the implausibility of national survival. This paper argues that an under-theorized tactic—if not goal—of the FCDA was the transmission of a nuclear metaphysics assigning ultimate causative power to the bomb itself. Bringing scholarship on civil defense from the fields of affect theory, performance studies, and cultural criticism into contact with the framework of ritual to reevaluate the FCDA archive allows a clearer evaluation of these metaphysics. This paper further argues that the reinscription of the bomb as a metaphysical entity rendered invisible all forms of imperial violence other than total nuclear war.
For centuries, civilizations and communities around the world have utilized ceremonial rites of passage to welcome home returning warriors. Yet today, veteran reintegration into society after being deployed in a war context is often a fraught process. We don’t have a standardized ritual or a structured method of offering returning soldiers a sense of purification, emotional release, or the time and space for personal healing. When soldiers are too quickly reintegrated it can be detrimental to their mental health, overall well-being, and the well-being of their families. In a similar vein, people returning to society after incarceration are often plagued by both the trauma of their past actions and their experiences in prison. Yet a rite of purification and intentional reintegration is not part of the prison release process. In this paper I utilize Turner’s social drama theory to examine two organizations tat offer models of what a reintegration ritual might look like.