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Bakhtin observed that language is inherently dialogic as speakers respond to past utterances and anticipate future ones. Yet Bakhtin also noted that speakers can engage in monologic projects in attempts to unify voices and accents in the service of a single "carrier," such as God or nation. I argue that monologism and dialogism are copresent tendencies in speech and that they can be analyzed productively in relation to a third term, "silence," which can be dialogic as well as monologic. To attend to silence, it becomes necessary to examine monologically and dialogically oriented participant structures, pulling language ideologies and practices into the same analytical frame. I analyze the relationships between monologism and monologue, dialogism and dialogue, and silence in ritual speech at Spiritualist services. At these events, audience members silently generate healing energy, and mediums construct what I call "hinged dialogues" in which they have largely silent conversations with spirit figures and connect these conversations with living audience members who are compelled to respond in constrained but dialogically productive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested whether religious ritual lessens or increases stress and anxiety among indigenous Sahariya conservation refugees recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. Combining ethnography with structured survey and salivary analyte data (the stress hormone cortisol), we tracked di/stress over two 9-day periods before, during, and after Sahariya celebrations of the Hindu holidays of Holi and Navratri. Results show postritual improvement on all psychiatric and analyte data. The effects were larger for individuals who were wealthier and reported higher insecurity, suggesting that ritual healing might be impacted by infusions of cash and resources and also by the relative precariousness of the performance context. Likewise, health improvements were lower for individuals reporting higher anxiety and depression, implying that rites such as these are more likely to instill psychosomatic resilience in healthy individuals than to serve as a psychotherapeutic intervention for persons suffering more severely. Our results suggest that the local work of culture can serve as a potentially important source of health resilience in situations of high uncertainty, potentially preventing stress- and trauma-induced suffering, which should be taken into account by state and NGO organizations extending aid to the world's poor in similar disaster and refugee contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many anthropologists of Inner Asia have examined the use of ritual cairns that pepper the landscape of the region. These cairns are devoted to a variety of spirits and are typically placed on territorial borders. Cairn rites devoted to these spirits can be both collective and individualized affairs, and some anthropologists have suggested that collective cairn rites may facilitate a stronger sense of in-group solidarity, which, in turn, must be predicated on a heightened sense of trustworthiness signaled by ritual participants. The present work investigates whether or not people in the Tyva Republic find others who regularly participate in cairn practices as more trustworthy than those who do not engage in such rituals. Indeed, ethnic Tyvans who regularly participate in these rites are perceived as more trustworthy than ethnic Tyvans, Christian Tyvans, and Christian Russians who do not. These findings strongly suggest that cairn practices ritualistically display commitment to others and thus help explain why the tradition persists throughout Inner Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social construction of identity and memory can be expressed through public ritual. The organization of mortuary practices, the repetitive use of imagery and figurines, and the long-term reuse of human skulls in the Near Eastern Neolithic illustrate how household ritual linked the living to the dead. Secondary mortuary practices and the plastering and painting of human skulls as ritual heirlooms served as a form of memorialization and erasure of identity within communities. The deliberate focus on the face in both construction and decoration was part of a shared system of ritual practices. Skull caching and modification transcended the past, present, and future, reiterating the expectation of future mortuary events while simultaneously recognizing continuity with the past through the crafting of memory. Collectively these patterns represent a complex web of interaction involving ritual knowledge, imagery, mortuary practices, and the creation of intergenerational memory and structures of authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to correlate collective rituals as an expression and reaffirmation of shared beliefs, norms and values and communal stability and group harmony. Despite having achieved the status of conventional anthropological wisdom, the relationship between ritual performance and group solidarity has not been demonstrated empirically. The kibbutz was originally conceived as a small collective farming settlement in which members based their social and cultural lives on the collective ownership of property and wealth. The kibbutz developed out of an egalitarian ideology. This article seeks to find a reason as to why women are not allowed to participate in certain religious practices. These gender differences in ritual practice provide an opportunity to examine directly how group ritual performance impacts cooperative behavior hypotheses. The article also discusses challenges faced by kibbutzim in promoting and maintaining cooperation among its members.

The article presents the author reply to comments on her article "The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers." She rendered gratitude to invaluable comments on her article about Maya rituals. She explained the materialistic attitude in relation to political power highlighting the practical side of a complex feature. Her reference to political power speculates a concern with the details of surplus allocation which contains both material and nonmaterial aspects.

This paper develops a concept of competitive sharing to explain how sacred sites that have long been shared by members of differing religious communities and may even exhibit syncretic mixtures of the practices of both may come to be seized or destroyed by members of one of them in order to manifest dominance over the other. This competitive sharing is compatible with the passive meaning of "tolerance" as noninterference but incompatible with the active meaning of tolerance as embrace of the Other. Confusion of this passive noninterference with the active embrace of the Other is shown to lie at the heart of a critical weakness of most current explanations of nationalist conflict in the Balkans and communal conflict in India. Several discomfiting conclusions follow. One is that positive tolerance requires social stasis and thus is akin to a Lévi-Straussian myth, a "machine for the suppression of time." Second, democracy based on the consent of the governed may often be incompatible with programs that mandate positive tolerance. Third, syncretism may be fostered by inequality and is actually endangered by equality between the groups. Rather than try to avoid these uncomfortable conclusions, the paper adopts the argument of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov for the superiority of an "ethics of responsibility" over an "ethics of conviction," concluding that scholarly ethics requires reporting research findings that are contrary to that which many would prefer to be true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Roy Rappaport's theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaport's theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for language's shortcomings. Here, Rappaport's argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of San rock art have generally assumed the existence of a structurally uniform ‘pan-San’ cognitive system from at least 2,000 years B.P. to the present all over southern Africa. It is suggested here that the assumption of continuities in San religious ideology and ritual practice has resulted in insufficient attention to the possible influence of the ideologies and ritual practices of encapsulating black farming communities on the cosmologies and ritual life of their San neighbours and the expression of this influence in the rock art. In the light of recent studies demonstrating the profound effects of contact on hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and elsewhere, the possible expression of southern Nguni and Sotho religious concepts and ritual practices in the rock art of the south-eastern mountains of southern Africa, as a result of symbiotic interaction between south-eastern San and black farmers, is investigated bere. Some of the implications of such symbiotic interaction for the use of ethnographic analogy to interpret rock art and other iconography, as well as some of the implications for debates surrounding the cultural identity of hunter-gatherers in Africa and elsewhere, are discussed. Investigates the possible expression of southern Nguni and Sotho religious concepts and ritual practices in the rock art of the southeastern mountains of southern Africa. Symbiotic interaction between southeastern San and black farmers; Explanation of the overt content and underlying symbolism of San rock art; Paintings in Melikane and Upper Mangolong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a detailed discussion of the chemical and contextual analysis of snuff powders from the pre-Hispanic time of San Pedro de Atacama. It states that humans since ancient times have used plants not only as sources of food but also as part of their healing practices and rituals. It mentions that in pre-Hispanic times, the river valleys and oases of the Atacama desert of northern Chile were occupied by a succession of preceramic hunter-gatherers and ceramic-stage agriculturists and herders.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on referencing ideologies of communication for understanding the variation in ritual performances. According to the author, the research paper of Robbins fits well into the reorientation, especially noticeable in contemporary linguistic anthropology, of language studies towards forms of ritualization, patterning, and regulated performance. Moreover, he thinks that Robbins sets thinking about ritual versus language.

The author reflects on the theory of Joel Robbins on Rappaport's theory of ritual performance and communication. According to the author, Rappaport's theory is general and meant to be applied, with certain caveats, to all known forms of human religion and cultures, past and present. The author questions the suggestions of Robbins that Rappaport's lack of attention to linguistic ideologies was an oversight that once corrected, allows the original theory to make an even more powerful contribution to the comparative analysis of ritual.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on the relationship between ritual and linguistic ideology. He supports the suggestion of Robbins on the necessity for an anthropological study of understanding speech. Moreover, it is sensible, to investigate the relation between people's ideas about language and their ideas about ritual because, provided one supposes that it is meant to mean, ritual can always be rendered meaningful and thus communicative.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual. As a linguistic anthropologist himself, the author believes that rituals can also be seen as actional texts or comparable to a form of communication. Thus, in his view, Robbins' account correctly invokes linguistic or, more broadly, semiotic ideology as something to be considered in understanding ritual, but, not to draw out the implications for a theory of culture.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on the theory of American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport on ritual performance and communication. According to the author, Robbins is certainly right when he claims that Rappaport's theory of ritual and religion lends itself to an interesting interpretation in terms of Austin's performative approach to language. However, he thinks that ritual cannot be both a performative in the original Austinian sense and indexically self-authenticating in Rappaport's sense, as explicated by Robbins.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual. In his belief, Rappaport's theory on ritual contributes to what, in contemporary cultural anthropology, is a languishing enterprise, heroic theory building. However, he supports the emphasis given by Robbins on language ideology as one of the references in understanding the variation in ritual performances.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on the major work of American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport on ritual. For him, Robbins provides a lucid summary of some of the critical points Rappaport's idea on ritual. According to the author, Robbins's concept of linguistic ideology partly fails him in his attempt to provide a supplement to Rappaport's theory. He specifically argues the collective term used by Robbins on the way Rappaport sets up language as the source of problems that only ritual can resolve, calling it language ideology.

The author reflects on the idea of Joel Robbins on the relationship between ritual and linguistic ideology. The author thinks that although Robbins often seems to endorse American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's perspective on the capacity of ritual to nullify the threats of language, Robbins also seems to demur, as, when he points out that Rappaport's account of ritual fits particularly neatly with the views of some cultures but not all of them.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on referencing ideologies of communication for understanding the variation in ritual performances. In the author's perspectives the idea of Robbins poses some interesting questions because the ideologies of communication are particularly interpersonal dimensions of power and epistemology, understanding their relationships to the forms of ritual performances opens the way to more complex understandings of the ritual experience.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that Yang's paper has unsettled the dominant productivity stance which considered to be one of the major orthodoxies of economic anthropology. He asserts that Yang has offered a sobering reflection about the nature of global capitalism and on the current fascination in management-school circles with the phenomenon of the so-called Confucian capitalism.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." She states that Yang replaces monolithic global capitalism with economic hybridity and that her article highlights instances in which a market economy has reactivated the principle of exuberant community ritual display and consumption. She raises the question on how Yang distanced her argument from the official ways of capitalist domestication and believes that popular ritual has a special place in the regional realm of histories.

The article comments on the research paper "The Politics of Ritual: The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers," by Lisa J. Lucero. According to the author, the ritual practice considered as the chief source of elite power that evolved from household ritual power as described by Lucero. He views that the marking of household patterns as elite classes envisages component of segmentary states and politics found immensely in Maya society.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on referencing ideologies of communication for understanding the variation in ritual performances. He thinks that ideologies about ritual and language vary significantly both historically and locally and in very complex ways. Moreover, he supports Robbins' suggestion that their relationship warrants further investigation and that the key to success in this endeavor is attention to ethnographic and historical detail.

The author reflects on the idea of author Joel Robbins on American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport's theory of ritual performance and communication. He cited the idea of Edmund Leach, which states that the speech itself is a form of ritual, as a good example of the reason behind the reference given by Robbins of communication with understanding the variation of ritual performance. However, he also pointed out that communication is not the only basis in understanding ritual performance, since there are many culture-specific forms of ritual communication and different levels within them.