Catherine M. Bell’s profound insight was that ritual, long Theory, Ritual Practice presents the theories and observations that Cath-.
289 pages
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OXPORDUNIVERSITY PRESSOxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that furtherOxford University’s objective of excellencein research, scholarship, and education.Oxford New YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City NairobiNew Delhi Shanghai Taipei TorontoWith offices inArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine VietnamCopyright © 1992 by Catherine BellForeword © 2009 by Oxford University PressPublished by Oxford University Press, Inc.198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4314www.oup.comFirst issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2009Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University PressAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without the prior permission of the publisher.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBell, Catherine M., 1953-Ritual theory, ritual practice / Catherine Bell.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-19-973362-0i. Ritual. 2. AnthropologyŠMethodology. I. Title.BL6oo.B46 1992291.3*8Šdc20 91-16816 CIP17 19 18Printed in the United States of Americaon acid-free paper
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” I take ritual to be the basic social act.” R. RAPPAPORT1″Ritual is pure activity, without meaning or goal.” F. STAALZThis [interpretation] has allowed the scholarly fantasy thatritual is an affair of the tremendum rather than a quiteordinary mode of human social labor.” J.Z. SMITH3″Ritual [is] like a favoured instance of a game “C. LEVI-STRAUSS4″In ritual, the world as lived and the world as imaginedturn out to be the same world.” C. GEERTZS”[There is] the widest possible disagreement as to how theword ritual should be understood.” E. LEACH*”The more intractable puzzles in comparative religion arisebecause human experience has been wrongly divided.”M. DOUGLAS7
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Foreword: Notes on a FriendshipRitual Theory, Ritual Practice, reissued here more than 17 years after itsinitial publication, changed the framework for understanding the nature and function of ritual. Catherine M. Bell’s profound insight was that ritual, longunderstood as thoughtless action stripped of context, is more interestingly understood as strategy: a culturally strategic way of acting in the world.Ritual is a form of social activity. This argument is meticulously establishedand beautifully presented in the chapters that follow. Unfolding like a com-manding lecture, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice remains Catherine’s great-est contribution to the study of religion.This book, in many ways, constitutes one part of what Anthony Gid-dens would call the “front and back regions” of any scholarly life. RitualTheory, Ritual Practice presents the theories and observations that Cath-erine placed “front” and center for all to see. Explicit in her life but also embedded in this book, however, are other lessons. They linger in the “backregion,” so to speak, for someone to notice and point out.These lessons are strikingly visible to me because, for thirty yearsCatherine Bell was a friend, a mentor, and an inspiration to me. I met herfirst at the University of Chicago in the late ‘yos when we were graduatestudents at the Divinity School. I was studying Freud, Rorschach, andreligion; she was studying Chinese morality books. Hearing her present her research in Joseph Kitagawa’s seminar, was an “aha experience” for me: “So that’s how to do a seminar presentation!” I found myself tak-ing notes on how she organized her material and presented her thesis. In1985 Catherine joined the Religious Studies department at Santa ClaraUniversity where I had been teaching for a year, and that graduate school”aha experience” deepened into a close friendship. During our years as colleagues, I found myself continuing to take notes on Catherine’s way ofthinking, working, and living – her “practices” until her death in 2008.Note i: Don’t be constrained by the present or the past.Catherine had a remarkable ability to think beyond the frame of both current discourse and past practice. While many scholars recount the debates thathave shaped their field and make a small contribution to move the discourse
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viii Foreword: Notes on a Friendshipforward, she transformed the way that scholars in our field think and write.She sketched out contemporary debates, traced historical lineages, and thentook stunning conceptual leaps, rearranging pieces in entirely new, and thor-oughly enlightening, ways. There’s a fearlessness to her work. She speaksthe truth, unconstrained by concerns about critical reactions – an importantlesson for those whose schooling in tact and diplomacy can place limits on creative vision.Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice illustrates well her fearless intellectualstyle and her sense of freedom from past constructions. The book receivedthe award for the “Best First Book in the History of Religions” in 1994,and has redirected the thinking of the discipline. One cannot write on ritualtoday without citing her work. Her ability to perceive the current topogra-phy and see beyond the horizon inspires me still.Note 2: Look for large patterns and ask big questions.Catherine’s practice of asking big questions and seeking large patterns is clearly visible in her work; it was evident in her course development andpedagogy as well. She structured every course around a compelling intel-lectual question that would both capture the interest of her students andtackle an unresolved problem in the discipline. Her students – all under-graduates – participated in creating scholarly trajectories, sorting through data, discerning patterns, and struggling to find answers. Whether teachingmethodology in “Ways of Studying Religion,” area studies in “Asian Reli-gions,” or advanced courses like “Magic, Science and Religion,” “Time andthe Millennium,” or “Religion and Violence,” she challenged and inspired her students to ask real questions, to understand the significance of thosequestions for the contemporary world, and to perceive the larger patterns emerging from texts and practices.Always attentive to the patterns in how students learn, it was Cath-erine who first brought me a copy of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive development: she had designed a series of assignments to guidestudents toward increasingly sophisticated thinking, challenging them tomove from comparison to interpretation, and then to analysis and evalua- tion. She suggested that in the classroom “nothing stands alone” – every text must be carefully paired with another so that students can tease outcontradictions and develop new syntheses. And she created guidelines on “how to read a book when you’re not reading it for pleasure.” Her instruc-tions started with self awareness and self inquiry: “What are your ques- tions?” Next, she instructed, one must ask about the author as “Other”:”What is the author’s intent?” Finally, she directed her students to inte-
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Foreword: Notes on a Friendship ixgrate self understanding and close reading of the text by “engaging in critical reflection and creative response.” Her guidelines worked: her stu- dents were truly touched by the books they read with her. They producedremarkable work in her courses, and they carried newly developed criticaland creative abilities into other courses, into graduate programs, and into life beyond the academy.Note 3: Transform the personal into the professional.Catherine was a master at understanding how individual questions or prob- lems could be addressed through structural changes. Her legacy in thisregard is visible within a number of lasting structures at Santa Clara. Expe- riencing a need for greater community among women she created a still- thriving Women’s Faculty Group. Perceiving a need for mentoring of juniorfaculty she urged the creation of a now flourishing Faculty DevelopmentProgram. Struggling within a hierarchical administrative structure, she leda movement to transform university governance and decision-making into asystem that garnered a 1998 Ralph S. Brown Award for Shared Governancefrom the American Association of University Professors. She consistentlyused her own experience as a spark to ignite creative thinking and buildcommunity.Catherine left behind an unfinished manuscript, Believing and thePractice of Religion, in which she wrote, “An investigation of a topicshould begin with an exploration of why that topic warrants one’s inter-est in the first place An investigator should understand why the topic constitutes a ‘problem’ – at least for her.” She beautifully captures thisshift from personal to professional: “Once I was a believer, thought-fully and intimately committed, and then I was no longer one, with a different set of thoughts and emotions. While I was able to ‘explain’my believing and my not-believing in the popular Freudian patois of the day, I wanted to assemble a fuller picture of what had happened andexplore whether what was true for me might be useful for understand- ing others.”And she proposed a new way of speaking about belief, a more selfconscious and critically reflexive analysis of the category of belief, aimingto change “where our confidence lies” when using the “language of belief.” Her goal: to create a conversation about “how we think of ourselves.. .and how we think about what we are doing with our inherited interpretive cat-egories.” Catherine’s unfinished manuscript will be available to scholarsthrough the archives of Santa Clara University’s library.
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x Foreword: Notes on a FriendshipNote 4: Find pleasure in creativity.Catherine’s creativity transcended her academic and scholarly contribu-tions. Her luminous spirit is vividly present in writings both playful andprofound drafted for more limited audiences. At the turn of the millen-nium, she wrote a “Millennial Masque,” a play in Shakespearean versefor a group of friends and colleagues to perform on New Year’s Eve. Shewas to play “The Scholar”; I was to read the part of “Madame Butterfly” wearing a red silk kimono she had purchased in Japan. Her husband hadthe role of Cardinal Ex Corde; my husband was commissioned to be the musician for the performance. Other colleagues were assigned such rolesas: “The Grim Reaper,” “The Keeper of the Clocks,” and the “Orphic Chorus.”The “Masque” was never performed. Tragically, Catherine spent thefirst night of the new millennium in the emergency room with the firstsymptoms of the multiple sclerosis that would shadow the last decade ofher life. The “Millennial Masque” captures her spirit beautifully: it’s liter-ary, playful, and profound. It’s about life, death, and love; beginnings and endings; and the desire for change. As if she anticipated her own life story,time and the millennium serve as metaphors for the presence of death in the midst of life:The time is upon us for a millennial shift To mark the moment -we offer this giftIf it be more beginning or end I cannot presume to suggest or pretend But whether welcomed or welcomed notTis a moment of time not soon forgot Time is what binds us and tears us apartBut for every ending we can attempt a new start.Writing in May 2009, just a year after her death, I am only too awarethat these notes on a friendship fail to capture the luminous reality of Cathe- rine’s presence and practice. But I am immensely grateful to have had threedecades – an extended “moment of time not soon forgot” – to take notes onthe practice of a generous mentor, an inspiring colleague, and a dear friend. And I am honored to be a participant in the reissuing of this volume, anembodiment, in some sense, of Catherine’s words: “for every ending we can attempt a new start.”Diane Jonte-Pace, Santa Clara University
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