This essay provides an outline and a history of the theory of performance. This new macro-sociological theory reconfigures the concept of ritual into a more complex model of social action as lying in the continuum between the analytic poles of successful and failed performances. I argue that the more complex and segmented social and cultural structures become, the more the elements of performan...

Ethnicity belongs to the most important types of differentiation in Laos. Among the means to establish such differences is the ascription of bodies of knowledge to various ethnicities. Ritual healing knowledge is often associated with the foreign and the culturally different. The attribution of differentiated categories of foreignness thus supports the emergence and reproduction of ethnic diffe...

This article traces the effects of modern commercial ritual spaces and new crematoriums on the meaning and structure of contemporary Japanese funerals. The widening physical separation between the mourning family and the corpse throughout the death process parallels an increase in the ritual authority of the professional funeral industry, which has led to several notable variations in funeral s...

1 Introduction The emergence of cognitive science over the past thirty years has stimulated new approaches to traditional problems and materials in well-established disciplines. Those approaches have generated new insights and reinvigorated aspirations for theories in the sciences of the socio-cultural (about the structures and uses of symbols and the cognitive processes underlying them) that a...

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This paper explores how the dongba as the ritual practitioner perceives his authenticity during the marriage ceremony in the Naxi Wedding Courtyard in Lijiang, China. Through the dongba’s life story, the paper indicates that, the power of his making judgment is not entirely related to the toured objects, socially constructed reality or the existential feeling, but also has to do with what happe...

Deciphering recently discovered cave paintings by the Astracinca, an egalitarian leaderless society flourishing in the 3rd millennium BCE, we present and analyze their shamanic ritual for forming new colonies. This ritual can actually be used by systems of anonymous mobile finite-state computational entities located and operating in a grid to solve the line recovery problem, a task that has bot...

The patient has a general sense that something terrible may occur if a particular ritual is not performed, and the failure to perform a ritual may lead immediately to severe anxiety or a very uncomfortable, nagging feeling of incompleteness. In addition to checking and washing rituals, patients with OCD often present with persistent intrusive thoughts, extreme slowness or thoroughness, or doubt...

Isa bey tekke does not exist any more in Sarajevo. This valuable cultural heritage object was completely destroyed and a gasoline station was built in its place. Virtual reconstruction has recovered the appearance of the building, but not what was happening inside. The Mevlevi dervish ritual was presented using interactive computer animation. The goal of this paper is to explore the perception ...