Ritual, Performance and the Senses
Sensory Studies Series
General Editor: David Howes
As the leading publisher of works on the social life of the senses, Bloomsbury is pleased to announce this new series dedicated to exploring the varieties of sensory experience. By delving into the sights, sounds, scents, savours, textures, and rhythms of diverse times and places, sensory studies provides many stimulating insights into how people make sense of the world through the senses. Incorporating approaches from across the humanities and social sciences, this series offers a fresh way to understand culture within a diversity of contexts. It will feature translations into English of key works in other languages, beginning with Franois Laplantines The Life of the Senses. It will also present critical investigations of the sensory dimensions of politics and religion, food and architecture, art and commerce, affect and performance, among other topics.
Through positioning the senses as both object of study and means of inquiry, the Sensory Studies series will make for sensational reading and testify to the deep interpretive and explanatory power of sensuous scholarship. The sensoriom is a fascinating focus for cultural studies (www.sensorystudies.org).
Ritual, Performance and the Senses
MichaelBullandJon P.Mitchell
First published 2015 by Bloomsbury Academic
Published 2020 by Routledge
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Copyright Michael Bull and Jon P.Mitchell, 2015
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN13: 978-0-8578-5473-5 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-1-3500-0151-0 (pbk)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ritual, performance and the senses / edited by Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchell.
pages cm. (Sensory studies series, ISSN 2052-3092)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85785-473-5 (hardback)
1. Rites and ceremonies 2. Ritual. 3. Neuroanthropology. 4. Senses and sensation.
5. AnthropologyMethodology. I. Bull, Michael, 1952- editor of compilation.
II. Mitchell, Jon P., editor of compilation.
GN473.R37 2015
301.01dc23
2014037299
Series: Sensory Studies Series
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex. He has recently edited a four-volume work on Sound Studies for Routledge (2013). He is also the co-founding editor of the journal The Senses and Society and has recently, with Veit Erlmann, founded the Sound Studies Journal for Bloomsbury.
Greg Downey is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University. His research field focuses on the perceptual, phenomenological, and physiological effects of long-term physical training. In 2005 he published Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art for Oxford University Press.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. His publications include Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society, co-authored with Constance Classen (Routledge 2014) and Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (University of Michigan Press 2003). He is also the editor of A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 19202000 (Bloomsbury 2014) and the Co-Founding Editor of The Senses and Society journal.
Trevor Marchand is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS and recipient of the RAI Rivers Medal (2014). He is trained in architecture (McGill), anthropology (SOAS), and fine woodwork (Building Crafts College). Marchand conducted fieldwork with masons and craftspeople in Yemen, Mali, and East London. He is the author of Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001), The Masons of Djenn (2009), and The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (forthcoming); and editor of, among others, Making Knowledge (2010) and Craftwork as Problem Solving (2015). He has produced and directed documentary films, and curated exhibitions at the RIBA and the Smithsonian Institution.
Zoila Mendoza is a professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis. Her publications include Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes (University of Chicago Press 2000) and Creating OurOwn: Folklore, Performance and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (Duke University Press 2008)
Jon P. Mitchell is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex and has written widely on ritual in Maltese culture, including Ambivalent Europeans: ritual, memory and the public sphere (Routledge 2002). Most recently he has co-authored with Gary Armstrong (2008) Global and Local Football: Politics and Europeanisation on the fringes of the EU (London: Routledge).
Richard Schechner is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. His many books include Public Domain (1968), Environmental Theater (1973), The End of Humanism (1981), Performance Theory (1988), and The Future of Ritual (1993). His books have been translated into numerous languages.
Robert Turner is Director of the Max Plank Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He is also Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Physics and Earth Sciences, University of Leipzig, and Honorary Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely in the field of human cognition.
Phillip Zarrilli is Professor Emeritus of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter, and a Research Fellow at IRC Freie Universitat (Berlin). He is internationally known for training actors and as a director. Among his many books are Psychophysical Acting: an intercultural approach after Stanislavski (2009) and (co-author) Acting: psychophysical phenomenon and process (intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives) (2013).
MichaelBullandJonP.Mitchell
An Experiment in Anthropological Theory
This book explores the potential of combining cognitive/neuroanthropology, performance studies, and the anthropology of the senses to develop a new understanding of religious transmission.
