Ronald L. Grimes has had a critical influence on the development of ritual theory and the practice of ritual studies over the last fifty years. To both honor and evaluate Grimes’s work, this roundtable features a talk by Grimes, structured as a dialogue and discussion, followed by three papers on the appropriation and critical development of his insights in ritual studies across world religions. In recognition of the scope of Grimes’s influence, the session includes panelists from both the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.
Ronald L. Grimes’ typology of masking in Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1982) identifies fourphenomenological moments in the act of masking: concretion, concealment, embodiment, andexpression. This paper argues that the typology, for all its analytical power, does not account for afifth moment: one that has become structurally prominent in late-modern ritual contexts. Drawingon a decade of fieldwork at the Basel Carnival of Fasnacht (Switzerland) and on first-handaccounts of ritualists’ experiences of the Laarve (an oversized mask enclosing the entire head) wepropose enstasis as this fifth moment. Where Grimes’ embodiment moment is ecstatic and orientedtoward the dissolution of the interior-exterior boundary, enstatic masking is meditative andinward-oriented: the mask amplifies rather than dissolves the self’s distance from itself. We arguethat enstasis is phenomenologically irreducible to any of Grimes’ four moments and warrantsformal recognition in the typology.
In his essay “Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff fora Global Medicine Show” (2002) Ronald Grimes argues that too much environmentalism focuses on formulating ethical principles. Rather, as Grimes suggests, following poet Gary Snyder, “performance” is the currency we should be using to address our current environmental crises. We should be trying to figure out what actions, “rightly performed,” might save the planet. This argument was provocative to me and I began to wonder what “rightly performed” and “saving the planet” might mean in the context of ecological restoration practices, such as prescribed fire. In my current research, I draw on Grimes’ writing on ritual and the environment, using ritual as a lens through which to analyze cases where Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices around intentional fire converge on northern California’s wildfire-prone landscapes and burn scars. “Ecologically attuned rites,” to borrow Grimes’ phrase in “Ritual and the Environment” (2003), around intentional fire both express and constitute relationships with the more-than-human world. I explore the ways in which these attuned practices make, re-make, erode, transcend, and cross relational boundaries in both creative and destructive ways.
The paper presents the broad contours of major directions in the study of religious ritual, particularly cultic ritual, with reference to the role played by Ronald Grimes in the study of ritual in the 20th–21st centuries.
In order to contextualize his work, and more generally the achievements of ritology as an academic field of inquiry on a broad historical canvas, it begins by identifying three major analytical frameworks within ancient emic analytical discourses on ritual:
relational, ergic, and syntactic.
Examples of these analytical frameworks are demonstrated from intricate scholastic ritual literatures in South Asian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean contexts (Śābara-bhāṣya on Jaimini-mīmāṃsā-sūtra; Sifra and Babylonian Talmud; Iamblichus).
Proceeding to early modern contexts, this paper examines the role that the study of ritual played in the “New Science” of religion, and finally positions ritology within adjacent contemporary academic discourses. Finally, inspired by Grimes, it sketches out future directions in ritual studies.