Ritual, Performance and the Senses

Ritual, Performance and the Senses. Michael Bull and John P Mitchell, eds. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. ISBN 978-0857854964. Pp. 240.

Michael Bull's and John P. Mitchell's collection focuses on the experiential dimension of ritual through the interaction of three contrasting disciplines-cognitive studies, performance studies, and anthropology of the senses. This recent addition to Bloomsbury's Sensory Studies Series is not about affect theory and ritual; however, the discourse shaped by the volume's nine contributors (most of whom are anthropologists) should interest performance scholars looking for new theoretical language to discuss ritual beyond representation. The editors situate the volume as building from the work of cognitive anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, whose "rites of terror" explain the ways in which ritual experiences alter the body and, like trauma, become stronger as time passes. The volume is also in conversation with Bruce McConachie's recent call for a "biocultural performance studies" and is reminiscent of the work of Richard Schechner (one of the contributors), especially the structuralist vein in his writing exemplified by Between Theatre and Anthropology.

The book gives a refreshing glimpse at how performance studies enables scholars from other disciplines to locate the body at the center of religious transmission and to discuss beliefs in a way that avoids their reduction to symptoms of inferior epistemologies or fetishes of exoticization within academic discourse. For instance, in his study of the bleeding statue of Our Lady of Borg-in-Nadur in Malta and the miraculous visions of devotee Angelik Caruana, Jon Mitchell (chapter 1) proposes a performative turn in the anthropology of divine intervention to emphasize mimesis as embodied practice. His focus on the experiential dimensions and creative capacities of mimesis in ritual models an alternative approach to the ontological turn that, according to Mitchell, renders the anthropological project problematic by asserting that the alterity of religious practice cannot be represented in academic discourse but must be theorized on its own terms. Mitchell's theorization of mimesis as a process of representation carves a path for two sub-disciplines invested in representation-cognitive anthropology and anthropology of the senses-to shed new light on problems of alterity and interpretation in academic discourse.

The seven remaining essays travel in different directions, locating the body and its culturally enmeshed sensoria at the intersection of the brain, ritual, technology,...