Understanding Rituals

Within any society, rituals create, maintain and transform cultural identity and social relations. Daniel de Coppet presents six different contributions on how to understand ritual within the frame of contemporary social anthropology.

Understanding Rituals explores how ritual can be understood within the framework of contemporary social anthropology, and shows that ritual is now one of the most fertile fields of anthropological research. The contributors demonstrate how rituals create and maintain - or transform - a society's cultural identity and social relations. By examining specific rituals from various theoretical viewpoints, they reveal the ultimate and contradictory values to which each society as a whole is attached.