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Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Roy A. Rappaport. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 536 pp.
Reading and reviewing this volume has been an experience of pleasure and pain. Rappaport and I were colleagues at Michigan from the middle 1960s to the late 1980s and since that time we have talked and exchanged ideas over the past decade until his death in 1997; the experience I had is that we are still talking. Not only did Rappaport discuss his ideas in a Talmudic virtuosity, but the form of logic and argumentation is one which still resonates from page to page.
Although his writings over the past four decades are central to ecological approaches and political economy, I think that his writings on ritual and religion will be his most lasting contribution. Central to his vision on religion is the critical position of ritual. Following Durkheim, Otto, and Austin, ritual is understood as a set of formal properties and is defined as "the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers" (p. 24). These properties are performances that are liturgical, formal, invariant, communicative, and based on tradition. Furthermore, ritual messages are self referential as well as canonical. In developing these properties, Rappaport deals with the centrality of sacred discourse (as did Durkheim) but he is also acutely aware that dualistic contrasts such as sacred/profane are not only limiting but they also may distort the vitality of religion, a point that was noted...