Ritual, Media, and Conflict [Paperback]

Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?

1 Ritual, Media, and Conflict: An Introduction
Ronald L. Grimes
2 From Ritual Ground to Stage
Fletcher DuBois, Erik de Maaker, Karin Polit, and Marianne Riphagen
3 Insurgents and Icons
Anna-Karina Hermkens and Eric Venbrux
4 Ritual as a Source of Conflict
Robert Langer, Thomas Quartier, Udo Simon, Jan Snoek, and Gerard Wiegers
5 Place, Action, and Community in Internet Rituals
Marga Altena, Catrien Notermans, Thomas Widlok
6 Contested Rituals in Virtual Worlds
Simone Heidbrink, Nadja Miczek, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
7 Media on the Ritual Battlefield
Ignace de Haes, Ute H?sken, and Paul van der Velde
8 What's at Stake in Torture?
Werner Binder, Tom F. Driver, and Barry Stephenson
9 Refracting Ritual: An Upside-down Perspective on Ritual, Media and Conflict
Michael Houseman

Scholars of religion will be well served by this thought-provoking volume, no matter how much experience they have with these issues. The wide ranging and engaging case studlSÑ