Senior Lecturer Paul-Francois Tremlett was one of the editors of the new Equinox volume, Ritual and Democracy: Protests, Publics and Performances, along with Sarah M. Pike (California State University) and Jone Salomonsen (University of Oslo). Ritual and Democracy explores the complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts.
This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The seven research-led chapters presented here document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual, and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.
The book grew out of the Norwegian Research Council funded project “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource”, to which several OU RS staff contributed. As well as Paul-Francois’ chapter, “A Tale of Two Energies: The Political Agency of Things”, it includes a chapter by Graham Harvey, entitled “Trans-Indigenous Festivals: Democracy and Emplacement”,
Equinox are offering a 25% discount. Go to https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/ritual-democracy/, and enter the code RELIGION at checkout.