The Problem of Ritual Efficacy

Download or read book The Problem of Ritual Efficacy written by William Sax and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 10 contributed essays is the first to explicitly address the question of ritual efficacy. The authors do not aspire to answer the question 'how do rituals work?' in a simplistic fashion, but rather to show how complex the question is. While some contributors do indeed advance a particular theory of ritual efficacy, others ask whether the question makes any sense at all, and most show how complex it is by referring to the sociocultural environment in which it is posed, since the answer depends on who is asking the question, and what criteria they use to evaluate the efficacy of ritual.