BLOG - Ritual Textuality: Review Forum

I am grateful to the reviewers for their engaged readings of Ritual Textuality and to AnthroCyBib for hosting this forum. It is both daunting and exhilarating to watch one’s own book—such an intimately strange creation!—move into conversationsof critique. The reviewers have carefully described the argument and been generous in their responses. Individually and collectively, they raise insightful questions, especially about dimensions of metaphor, the utility of typologies, and the limits of language. I will address each reviewer’s contribution individually. Girish Daswani, focusing on the metaphor of motion, asks a series of interlinked questions. In what ways, he asks, might this metaphor be misleading, and how does one articulate it with critical dynamics such as reflexivity? Might ritual be an arena for “being moved…by forces that exist outside ritual performance,” and if so, what forces?