This panel explores the tension between rituals of liberation and ritual suppression by asking how ritual practices offer a sense of freedom, under what circumstances normative regimes ban or belittle ritual practices, and by what means practitioners reinvest their rituals with meaning in the face of a culture that minimizes them. The first paper considers the liberation afforded by decluttering rituals as they both produce and obscure waste. The second paper shows how evangelical women, constrained in their public actions by the norms of Christian femininity, turn their homes into prayer closets that allow them to privately act as “prayer warriors.” The third paper counters a history of misunderstanding and suppression by recovering the rituals and voices of Appalachian snake-handling. The fourth paper reveals investing in Bitcoin as a ritual that seeks to restructure power relations in the global economy and results in a sense of personal dignity and freedom.
In the past decade, the decluttering trend—a broad phenomenon that includes movements such as Minimalism, Slow Living, Simple Living, Swedish Death Cleaning, Feng Shui, Underconsumption Core, and Marie Kondo—has gained a significant following in the United States. The decluttering trend attributes agency to objects and assumes that unnecessary objects in the home actively restrict human freedom. This paper examines the decluttering rituals people engage in to free themselves of the hold their possessions have over them. I argue that these decluttering rituals produce and subsequently obscure waste. Thus, decluttering rituals liberate people from their possessions by burdening marginalized populations and places with managing the waste and absorbing its toxicity.
This paper uses influencer videos, Pinterest boards, and how-to blog posts to explore the intersection of space, gender, and evangelical religious practice in the space of the "prayer closet." It argues that the modern iteration of the prayer closet works as both an external demonstration of the user's piety and a way to claim religious power and authority in a community where women are expected to be, kind, nice, and prioritizing of others, if not explicitly submissive. Within her meticulously decorated prayer closet, a woman can wage war on forces of evil, whether they be Satanic influence or merely an upcoming midterm exam. Further, by waging this war in the privacy of her own home, a prayer closet user is able to claim the heroic violence of the title "prayer warrior" while maintaining the niceness that is appropriate to evangelical femininity everywhere outside of the prayer closet.
This study examines the ritual of serpent handling in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, drawing on fieldwork, practitioner interviews, and extensive analysis of books, articles, and videos. Using Cristina Bicchieri’s theories of unwritten rules, the research explores how implicit norms, such as the necessity of the “anointing,” sustain the ritual’s spiritual integrity and communal adherence. Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas highlight the transformative and unifying aspects of the practice, while Richard Schechner’s performance theories reveal the interplay between structure, spontaneity, and the dual purposes of efficacy and entertainment. By analyzing serpent handling as an embodied practice and a lived religion, this study demonstrates how the ritual bridges personal faith and collective identity. Through a multidisciplinary approach and diverse sources, the research contributes to a deeper understanding of the cultural, religious, and social dynamics that shape and sustain this unique tradition.
The concept of religion has proved rhetorically useful for both advocates and detractors of Bitcoin in their analysis of this new digital technology for storing and exchanging value, highlighting the good and wholesome aspects of religion or its irrational and dogmatic tendencies respectively. But scholars of religion have, thus far, mostly ignored cryptocurrencies. This paper turns to ritual theory to help us better understand this new technology and the freedom that its advocates find in it. I describe what Bitcoin is, discuss the reasons its advocates consider it liberating, and identify rituals that sustain Bitcoin “maximalists” in spite of the volatility of crypto markets. I argue that investing in Bitcoin can be understood as a ritual action that seeks to restructure power relations in the global economy, resulting in a sense of personal dignity and freedom.