Book Review: The Craft of Ritual Studies

Ron Grimes anticipates our first question about his “most complete statement of what he has to say about the study of ritual” to date, spending a few pages in the introduction explaining what he means by craft. It is, he says, a manual art.

Some who study ritual consider their labor a science; others regard it as an art. However, I’ve come to consider ritual studies a craft. Craft is art’s practical-minded, hands-on, manual-laborer cousin … As a manual art, or craft, ritual studies may lack the clout of science, … and the elevation of fine art, but it should not lack utility. If you can’t put your hand to this book and use it, something has gone awry. (4)

Grimes divides the book into three parts – method, case and theory – whose “relationship is circular and interactive rather than linear or hierarchical” (3). From Grimes’ point of view these three dance together whenever we try to understand the ways ritual works, what happens when it doesn’t, and how ritual does the work it does.

The Craft of Ritual Studies begins with a section on Method with how-to chapters on “Performing Research and Teaching,” “Fieldworking Ritual,” and “Reading, Writing, and Mediatizing Ritual.” Like any good teaching craftsperson, Grimes not only tells us how to carry out a practical study of ritual, but also why it is important to engage with rituals in these ways. That he leads with method instead of theory may strike some as odd, but Grimes makes a strong case for such an approach.

In The Craft of Ritual Studies, the illustrative case is the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta. Grimes returns to the site of some of his first ritual studies work undertaken thirty years before, published as Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This time, however, he is practicing the craft differently. Mediatizing ritual here means making audiovisual recordings of the 2007 Fiesta edited into videos, drawing the reader from text to recorded sounds and images and back to text. Grimes knows this is both essential to his understanding of ritual studies and fraught with hazards. “Most of us,” he says, “are not adept at tacking back and forth between online videos and words on a printed page, which is exactly what I am about to ask you to do” (95).

The introduction to the first chapter, “Filming Fiesta,” makes it clear that we are to begin with a video then move to the written text, then back to a video and so on. “The videos are the leading edge of the case; the chapters are its trailing edge” (96). I have read the Case section without and with the videos. Skipping the videos detracted from my understanding of the case study and thus of the craft of ritual studies. “A ritual is an event. Since an event is not a stone or a building, it persists for a moment, and then disappears” (96). The videoed and written texts represent the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta, which because the original event has disappeared are both important when we attempt to understand it. The second chapter, “Framing Fiesta,” sets the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta in lush historical context.

In the Theory section of his book, Grimes addresses one of his core metaphors, craft.

In the view I am proposing here, theory construction is a craft, which is to say, a hybrid—partly art, partly science. One has to observe, critique, and test, but one also has to imagine. Imaginative labor is undergirded with data and inferences from data, but in the final analysis, a theory is a piece of intellectual handiwork, with no more (or less) status than pottery-making. (177)

Five chapters make up the Theory part of The Craft of Ritual Studies: “Theorizing Ritual,” “Defining and Classifying Ritual,” “Mapping Ritual,” “Elements of Ritual,” and “Dynamics of Ritual.” While some readers may be tempted to skim over the first two parts on Method and Case, Grimes is clear that these sections are the ground of his theory chapters, which rest on those earlier sections and loop back to change them.

The craft metaphor does other work as well.

… Thinking of theory construction as a craft reminds us not to romanticize or elevate the activity, and it encourages us to judge it by its fruit. Craftspeople are supposed to have fewer pretentions than artists or scientists about their work. They are supposed to be humble, thinking of what they do as useful labor, not as a calling or expression of genius. (177)

By moving carefully between the Scylla of Romantic art and the Charybdis of venerated science, Grimes’ craft attempts to find a middle way for ritual studies.

Grimes intends the The Craft of Ritual Studies to be used in teaching: “the book and its accompanying online videos are designed with classrooms in mind” (3). Graduate students in any discipline or area where rituals occur will want to study this book. Its use in undergraduate teaching will need to be carefully thought out, but I have no doubt that those of us teaching undergraduates about religions will want to read The Craft with an eye to considering how it might best be used. Grimes offers us caution and reassurance, “Aimed at enhancing the dexterity of ritual studies researchers, the book may nevertheless induce disorientation, awkwardness, and self-consciousness, but students of ritual shouldn’t worry too much about these feelings, since they usually evaporate quickly” (3).

For anyone interested in the study of the ways ritual works and doesn’t work, as well as how rituals do the work they do, this book is essential.

Thomas Parkhill St Thomas University