Winter Carnival in a Western Town
Identity, Change, and the Good of the Community
Ritual, Festival, Celebration Series
“I do not know of any similar publication that takes this combined and intertwined perspective. It will inspire readers to consider their own experiences as worthy of scientific interest and to see familiar everyday routines from new perspectives.”
—Alf Arvidsson, Umeå University
The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending.
Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects.
Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally.
Contributors: Ruth Eggel, Lizette Gradén, Katarzyna Herd, Hanna Jansson, Audun Kjus, Karin Lindelöf, Jakob Löfgren, Sallie Pisera, Annie Woube, and Sheila Young
