Ritual performances don’t exist in the abstract. They take place and acquire meaning and value in specific contexts as the object of often conflicting claims and understandings destined to evolve over time. The contributors to this panel present case studies of rituals whose very identity has become the focus of such divergent appreciations.
Recent work in the field of ritual studies, notably Molly Farneth’s The Politics of Ritual, has taken up the theoretical lens of performativity in order to emphasize the ways in which rituals effect change in the social world. Yet the field has not sufficiently engaged with the performative work of rituals gone wrong. This paper is organized around an extended example—a story that Emil Fackenheim tells in his To Mend the World about a Yom Kippur fast in Auschwitz that took place on the wrong day. Relying on Farneth’s analysis of rituals as performatives, I argue that Fackenheim’s Yom Kippur story is an example of an infelicitous ritual that is still efficacious. It evidences that Jewish thought can survive after the Holocaust even though, or perhaps precisely because, the ritual breaks from normal procedure.
An international tourist phenomenon, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela brings hundreds of thousands of people to Europe each year. An historically Catholic pilgrimage, its religious history is downplayed today, with organizations like UNESCO focusing instead on its status as a repository of “cultural heritage.” This paper proposes the term “Camino modernism” to describe this transformation, tracing its origins in the work of nationalistic scholars in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its present deployment in advertising, literature, and academic writing on the Camino. I conclude by showing how the paradigm of Camino modernism permeates the study of pilgrimage more widely. Pilgrimage is often presented or described as an opportunity for affective transformation, a journey with transcendent potential. Thus it is vital to continue to ask how Camino modernism might color the meanings we make or identify in others.
Shenzuo originated from the veneration of vacant seats in ancestral temples and burial sites, where decorated empty spaces, adorned with canopies and coverings, were used to accommodate the descent of the deities and conduct religious ceremonies. After Eastern Han period, this practice began to be incorporated into various belief systems such as deity worship, Taoism, and Buddhism. On one hand, they adopted the practice of "preparing an empty seat for the divine", and on the other hand, they developed diverse practices. Therefore, the ritual practices in Buddhism and Taoism were also influenced by ancestor worship, sharing similar ritual resources with other indigenous beliefs.However, Buddhist practices were primarily limited to lay Buddhists, while monks and monasteries were less influenced, highlighting the existence of different practices within the same belief system among different communities.