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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell

Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource

Awarded: NOK 9.0 mill.

Global society is currently faced with complex crises and changes pertaining to ecology, religion, economy, and technology. In dealing with these challenges people mobilize cultural resources. Ritual is a cultural tool for the orientation and assembly of demoi, and a privileged medium in the articulation of memory, expression of identity and response to change. Thus, cultural resources become visible in ritual acts, which in turn become new cultural resources. Ritual, however, installs in its participants more than goodwill and vision, it installs skills. Ritual competence may therefore play a key role in developing peaceful co-habitation in multicultural society. Religious pluralization has become a characteristic feature of the cultural conditions driving societal change today. It is likely that new ritualizing social movements will embody pluralism in its own right and design new inclusive arenas for dialogue and collaboration. However, increased ritual pluralization seems to be occurring simultaneously with an increased bifurcation and politicization of religious traditions. The primary aim of the Reassembling Democracy project has been to explore how accelerating ritual pluralization and ritual mobilization among new stakeholders may have created new cultural conditions for community building, multicultural co-habitation, direct democracy and religious dialogue, but also for confrontation and eventually, a loss of faith in basic social institutions. A secondary aim has been to refine ritual studies theories and suggest models that can best explain ritual resourcefulness, not least its importance for the pre-political sphere of coming together across division, a prerequisite to keep democracy open to all. What is ritual? Ritual may be defined semiotically as the meaning-making of collective aspirations, or phenomenologically as embodied enactment of an oriented habitat. Ritual as a semiotic field highlights meaning, discourse and worldview, and invites analyses from the perspective of culture. Ritual as a phenomenological field highlights lived experience and embodied enactment. Ritual as a semiotic generates meaning and belief. Ritual as phenomenon generates form, feeling and body and constitutes an inter-relational ritual space. It invites analyses from the perspective of persons and inter-related collectives, and can easily include the-other-than-human both in its concept of environment and assembly. The lived body is perceived as sensible and spatial, while the semiotic body is perceived as cognitive and temporal. Main objectives. Interrogate how new public events and grassroots movements use (religious) ritual to mobilize cultural resources in response to unsettling social and environmental crises, and how ritual itself is a cultural resource that can be utilized to labor forth new democratic prospects.

Ritual acts construct, reveal and mobilize pervasive cultural resources. However, ritual is not merely a mobilizer, constructed by the social. As a precondition to construction of society, ritual contributes to change. Creative responses to crises trigger ed by the dynamics of contemporary global transformation commonly involve culturally and religiously informed ritualized actions. As people engage in such activities, they build new conditions for engagement and action, acquire and demonstrate novel compe tencies, and continuously renegotiate social identities, thereby transforming the democratic processes that constitute society. This project studies selected rituals as performances that arise out of and inspire social and environmental activism and grass roots political change, helping to deepening democratic process, shape the future, create community, and restructure society in a global context.

Funding scheme:

SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell