Negotiating Rites

In common understanding, but also in scholarly discourse, ritual has been long viewed as an undisputed and indisputable part of (especially religious) tradition, performed over and over in the same ways: stable in form, meaningless, preconcieved, and with the aim of creating harmony and enabling a tradition's survival. The authors of the papers in this collection seriously challenge these assumptions. Not only are rituals frequently disputed, they also constitute a field in which vital and sometimes even violent negotiations take place. Negotiations - here understood as processes of interaction during which differing positions are debated and/or acted out - are ubiquitous in ritual contexts, either in relation to the ritual itself, or in relation to the realm beyond any given ritual performance. The authors contend that a central feature of ritual is its embeddedness in negotiation processes and that life beyond the ritual frame often is negotiated in the field of rituals. By explicitly addressing and theorizing the relevance of negotiation in the world of ritual, the essays in this volume argue for a new starting point in a more nuanced discussion of ritual and negotiation.