Wednesday 6 March 2013

6.3. The sacred, fantastic, superstitious, ritual

Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention.
Place as fundamental characteristic of ritual: place directs attention.
Ritual is, above all, an assertion of difference in time, space, place, person, hierarchy.
Ritual is ordinary activities placed in extraordinary setting
- a magical imitation of desired ends
- a translation of emotions
- a symbolic acting out of ideas
- a dramatization of a text
- a relationship of difference between
- fundamentally about details

Some literature

Emile Durkheim: Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Jonathan Z Smith: To Take Place. Toward Theory in Ritual
Rene Girard: The Violence and the Sacred
Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer
Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane
Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger. An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo.

Walter Benjamin: Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire/ and Some Motifs in Baudelaire
Michel Serres: Rome, The Book of Foundations

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