The Politics of Ritualization and the Ritualization of Hope

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Catherine Bell (1992) defines ritualization as a mode of practice designed to distinguish itself from other more quotidian acts. It is a form of sacralization that often relies on formality, fixity and repetition to declare itself important. Ritualization thus can create hope by asserting certain outcomes are irreversible or that a given form of power is so awesome that it can only be revered. Meanwhile, however, ritual is always "power relations in action" as Bell puts it. Ritual thus is inherently political. The ritualization of hope thus leads us to ask not only how certain acts of hope have been ritualized, but also how the politics of these ritualizations is articulated. This panel explores the dynamics of the politics of ritualization and the ritualization of hope in China and Taiwan. We are concerned with how different social practices and social institutions have ritualized hope as well as how certain social and communicative acts are constructed as "ritual." We are interested in knowing what techniques of ritualization are appropriated in politics and what techniques of engaging politics render certain actions ritualized in people’s creation and imagination of hope. We explore questions like: Which kinds of politics are prone to ritualization and which are not and why? Who ritualized hope and who politicizes the ritualization? What are the social consequences of the ritualization of hope and the politicization of ritual?

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizers

• Huwy-min Lucia Liu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Andrew Kipnis, The Australian National University

Chair

• Andrew Kipnis, The Australian National University

Individual Presentations

• Indeterminacy, Hope, and Legitimacy in Social Ritual: China’s National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao) as a Fateful Rite of Passage - Zachary M. Howlett, Cornell University

• The Politics of Commemoration in China - Andrew Kipnis, The Australian National University

• Huwy-min Lucia Liu - Huwy-min Lucia Liu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Genealogies of Disruption: Ritual, Migration, and the Politics of Place in China’s Jahriyya Sufism - Guangtian Ha, SOAS, University of London

• Some Warriors Prefer Umbrellas: Competing Social Imaginations, Material Culture, and Hoped For Sovereignty in a Taiwanese Indigenous Community - DJ Hatfield, Berklee College of Music / National Taitung University