Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Social scientists have long studied ritual to decipher the mysteries of the human condition. Following this tradition, Davis-Floyd (Rice Univ.) and Laughlin (emer., Carleton Univ., Canada) mobilize numerous case studies, ranging from Navajo initiation rites and Buddhist meditation to hospital obstetrics, to demonstrate the power of ritual to shape bodies, emotional states, everyday dispositions, and world views. The book engages classic ethnographic studies and academic theories and presents the authors' personal experiences as ritual practitioners. Targeting nonspecialists unfamiliar with anthropological theory, it even provides a guide to effectively designing and orchestrating a ritual. Although eclectic and nuanced, the text often adopts functionalist and neuro-anthropological approaches to examine how ritual resolves hardships, fosters social solidarity, heightens consciousness, reduces stress, and confronts uncertainty. The authors also explore how authority figures have mobilized ritual for nefarious ends. Each chapter investigates one of eight characteristics that form part of a larger "anatomy of ritual," which includes everything from the intensified symbolism and performativity of ritual to its reliance on framing technologies. In sum, the book provides a fascinating introduction to ritual while offering innovative heuristics (e.g., ritual drivers, entrainment, symbolic penetration) to interpret how ritual effectively works.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

This slim volume challenges archaeologists to expand their discussions of household archaeology by critically examining the notion of the home and how it can be defined archaeologically and by considering the archaeology of people without houses and how they define the home. Sayers (American Univ.) examines a number of examples in the historical archaeology of the US, including the archaeology of home among migrant workers in 19th-century Michigan, notions of home among hobo encampments during the Great Depression, and the homes that escaped former slaves created in the Great Dismal Swamp. All these examples require researchers to look for the signatures of homes in artifact assemblages, pushing them to go beyond traditional studies conducted by archaeologists, which equate a single household with living in a domestic structure. Sayers also presents the home as an often contested space where material signatures of resistance against societal norms and intrafamilial conflict (e.g., domestic violence) can be teased out from a careful consideration of artifact assemblages. This carefully considered study offers researchers a new lens through which to explore a fundamental unit of archaeological analysis--the household.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.