Blurb:

This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, ‘Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’ (REDO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The chapters document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.