Logan Sparks & Paul Post (eds.) The Study of Culture through the Lens of Ritual Netherlands Studies in Ritual and Liturgy 15 Netherlands Studies in Ritual and Liturgy 15 Published by Institute for Ritual and Liturgical Studies, Protestant Theological University Institute for Christian Cultural Heritage, University of Groningen Secretary IRiLiS De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam PO Box 7161 1007 MC Amsterdam Phone: 020-5985716 E-mail: [email protected] Orders Instituut voor Christelijk Cultureel Erfgoed Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Oude Boteringestraat 38 9712 GK Groningen Phone: 050-3634587 E-mail: [email protected] Editorial board Marcel Barnard (chief editor, Amsterdam), Mirella Klomp (managing editor, Amsterdam), Joris Geldhof (Leuven), Martin Hoondert (Tilburg), Justin Kroesen (Groningen), Paul Post (Tilburg), Thomas Quartier (Nijmegen), Gerard Rouwhorst (Utrecht), Eric Venbrux (Nijmegen). Advisory Board Sible de Blaauw (Nijmegen), Bert Groen (Graz), Benedikt Kranemann (Erfurt), Jan Luth (Groningen), Peter Jan Margry (Amsterdam), Keith Pecklers (Rome/Boston), Susan Roll (Ottawa), Martin Stringer (Swansea). ISBN: 978-90-367-8005-6 ISSN: 1571-8808 Printed by: Ridderprint BV, the Netherlands Lay-out and cover design: Karin Berkhout Cover photo: Walter van Beek © 2015, by the authors No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the author and publishers. CONTENTS Preface v I. INTRODUCTION : RITUAL AS A LENS 1. Ritual as a lens for studying culture: Dangers and perspectives 3 Paul Post II. RITUAL PRACTICES 2 Through a wet lens: The Kapsiki and their rain rituals 21 Walter van Beek 3 The importance of Web 2.0 for Jihad 3.0: Female Jihadists coming to grips with religious violence on Facebook 37 Claudia Carvalho 4 Prenatal screening: A productive ritual? 55 Diane Doehring & Logan Sparks 5 From hairy to hairless: Body hair removal as a ritual among women in Arab cultures 69 Suzanne Elayan III. ART PERFORMANCES 6 Reworking the sense of belonging: The ritual of n’deep in Nonno Dio e gli spiriti danzanti by Pap Khouma 83 Raffaella Bianchi 7 The development of Ottoman public sociability through ritualistic forms in festivals and dramaturgical performances 95 Uğur Kömeçoğlu 8 A Jewish Requiem commemorating the Second World War: The performances of the Requiem by Hans Lachman 117 Martin J.M. Hoondert 9 ‘Doing it for the right reasons’: The ritual dimensions of festival Musica Sacra Maastricht 131 Lieke Wijnia iv Logan Sparks & Paul Post IV. RITUAL SPACE AND PLACE 10 Monuments for stillborn children in the Netherlands: The experiences of Roman Catholic parents 147 Laurie M.C. Faro 11 Spaces, places, traces: An afterlife for the body in natural burial practices 163 Tineke Nugteren 12 Last rites: Putting dependent elderly in their place 179 Martijn de Ruijter 13 Constructing transient sacred place: Three cases 193 Allen Scarboro & Jonelle Husain 14 The garden as a sacred place in Dutch suburbia 211 Inez Schippers V. PILGRIMAGE 15 Sendangsono revisited: Central Java through the lens of a Marian pilgrimage site 229 Herman L. Beck 16 Secular shrines and sacred cyberspaces: An overview of the spaces and faces of (neo)pagan ritual in Lima, Peru 245 Diego Alonso Huerta J. 17 Fusion and disruption: A Sufi pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe 259 Lucía Cirianni Salazar 18 Ritual authenticity as social criticism 273 Suzanne van der Beek About the authors 287 PREFACE Logan Sparks & Paul Post This book project has a twofold background. First of all, this text is connected to the First International Istanbul Ritual Studies Symposium, held at Süleyman Şah University in Istanbul, on the May 27th and 28th of 2014. This symposium was a cooperative initiative of the Department of Sociology in Istanbul and the research group ‘Ritual in Society’ of the Tilburg School of Humanities. The plan was to present and discuss case studies in the field of ritual studies. International and multi- or interdisciplinary perspectives were cen- tered, along with the creation of a space for both junior and senior scholars to interact. Ritual studies is a multidisciplinary platform or podium that emerged in the mid-1970s in the US. 1 In the beginning we especially saw cooperation between religious studies, anthropology, liturgical studies, and, in the US, also theatre stud- ies. Later the podium developed more and more into an open multidisciplinary field where one can find a sort of canon of themes and topics. In that there was, for instance, a strong interest in theory. Some of the central themes were (just to mention a few): initiation, pilgrimage, sacred place, ritual experts, ritual transfer, embodiment and, more recently, ritual failure, authenticity and cyber ritual. There are also the ‘usual suspects’ in Ritual Studies like Grimes, Bell, Rappaport, Douglas, Staal, Whitehouse and so forth. In the new millennium we see a tendency for in- novative research to be increasingly done in interdisciplinary thematic clusters. Not only is present-day Ritual Studies a cluster, as such, but we see also that Ritual Studies is part of other larger clusters. Among these are important clusters such as (again mentioning only a few): gender studies, urban studies, cultural memory stud- ies, cognitive studies (of religion), cyber studies. What we did in the symposium and in this book is challenge the Tilburg- Istanbul network to enter this Ritual Studies platform and present work where cul- tural and social phenomena and practices are approached through the lens, the entrance point of ritual. This emphasis can be translated into an approach to ritual 1 See for an overview of the domain of ritual studies: P. POST : ‘Ritual Studies’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2015), available at http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-21 (accessed September 2015). vi Logan Sparks & Paul Post as an analytical concept that brings in certain theoretical and methodological di- mensions. We see that, for instance, in the contribution of Scarboro via theoretical elements of ritual space, or Salazar and Beck via Turner’s theoretical work on pil- grimage and his concept of communitas . But the accent can also be on ritual practices as a thematization of cultural and social dynamics. That we find in the contribution on hair removal in Arab culture (Elayan) and the study on the n’deep ritual in the work of the Senegalese-Italian migrant author Pap Khouma (Bianchi). The book has, in this way, a very open character. Various disciplines explore cultural practices through the lens of ritual and ritual is itself, in turn, conceived of in an open way. We did not presuppose a more or less fixed definition of ritual or vision on ritual repertoires. For example, we encountered forms of traditional ritual repertoires like death and burial ritual (Nugteren) and rain rituals in Africa (Van Beek). Simultaneously we have authors who work with what Grimes would call ritualizations (such as music festivals, medical screening, gardening). The case studies show some preferences that very much are in line with Ritual Studies generally. All articles have a contemporary character. Furthermore, there is the dominance of the theme of sacred place and space (Schippers, De Ruijter, Alonso, Nugteren, Scarboro & Husain, Beck, Faro, Cirianni Salazar). Music is the thematization in two studies (Hoondert, Wijnia), and two are on cyber ritual (Alonso, Carvalho). We are also glad to have a broad spectrum in religious perspective. There is traditional African religiosity, the institutional religious contexts of Christianity and Islam (along with encounters between both of them in the Beck article on an Indonesian place of shared pilgrimage), but also the more diffused religious contexts of neo-paganism, and cultural practices with religious- ritual dimensions (the city garden of Schippers). It bears articulating that we have made the conscious choice here to allow these interesting perspectives to stand alone in their diversity rather than bringing in any comparative ambition via, for instance, this preface, an introduction, or a final chapter. Regarding the order of the articles we opted for a rather general and open framework based upon the basic dimensions of ritual: act/performance and place/space. We open with an Introduction part (I) with the article of Post which presents some historiographical and programmatic notes on the general use of ritual in studying culture. Not only are the advantages and perspectives of this way of working discussed, but explicitly also the dangers and pitfalls of the approach. After that there are two parts (II-III) with articles where ritual acting and per- formance are central. A first subpart (II) deals with practices in a general way and in a second (III) the focus is more on art performances. The next two sections (IV-V) deal with explorations chiefly thematizing place and space. Again, in the penultimate section we look at ritual from a more general gaze (IV) and then re-focus via the theme of pilgrimage (V) in the last section. Preface vii A second background is that we dedicate this book to our colleague Walter van Beek who is retiring from the chair of anthropology of religion in the Tilburg School of Humanities, November 2015. We present this book to him in the retiring ritual in November as a form of what Dutch scholars refer to as a Festschrift although it is not a traditional Festschrift , strictly speaking. That is because there is an article of Walter in this book, and normally one does not contribute to one’s own Festschrift or liber amicorum . Nevertheless the book is dedicated to Walter (Wouter in Dutch), it is a gift (a strong ritual practice) marking his farewell from the university (but not from academia) and thanking him for his enormous engage- ment both in education and research. Walter introduced not only many students and colleagues to the world of Africa, but also that of ritual and religion.