This work is about the sixth in a well‐established series of encyclopedias for college and school use. So far, others include millennialism and millennial movements, African and African‐American religions, fundamentalism, religion and war (RR 2004/301) and religious freedom (RR 2004/124). They all successfully and usefully bring together a wide range of topics under their chosen banner, making them particularly good for cross‐disciplinary work like assignments and projects, and as a way into subjects for students and teachers wanting a quick reference snapshot of a topic before consulting the literature in a more detailed way.
The work under review, again like the others, provides a wealth of well‐chosen references for following up relevant topics, and the inclusion of these will help library managers choosing resources online and for the shelf. They are all sturdily bound on good paper, in double‐column text, with sidebar quotations good for opening up discussion, with apt black‐and‐white photographs, and a well‐designed index. Salamone is general editor, professor of anthropology at Iona College in New Rochelle in New York, and author of several works on anthropology and cultural studies. He has assembled about 100 contributors, mainly North American, and between them they provide an interesting and topical insight into religious rites, rituals, and festivals.
Since the title is so wide, the binding principle and perspective is that of anthropology. This is not only the authors’ playing to their strengths: anthropology has substantially influenced the way in which we look at religion and ritual, and the historiographic aspects of this are picked up competently in this work. It allows the encyclopedia to cover both religious and secular ritual easily, and move clearly and cross‐culturally across ritual and rite, teasing out issues of performance and communication, control and magic, nature and paganism, symbol and taboo. Backing this up is the work of Van Gennep on rites of passage and Victor Turner on communitas, with Durkheim and Mauss, Mary Douglas and Geertz and others in the background. As a result the encyclopedia is strong on anthropological concepts (like communitas and gender, the liminal and purity, identity and misrecognition) which, demonstrably, enable the work to encompass its wide range in a credible and coherent way.
Its cross‐disciplinary approach is its distinctive strength and this draws logically from the hospitality of anthropology itself, above all for the understanding of religious ritual in a pluralistic and post‐modern context (although I should have liked more on post‐modern perspectives). Cultural diversity is recognized in at least three ways: first, in the inclusion of a wide range of social groups and practices (for example, Afro‐Caribbean and Azande to Melanesia and Yoruba, with an emphasis on native Americans, from arctic to pueblo); second, in the coverage of world religions (for example, Baha'i and Jainism, and Pentecostalism and Shinto, to Sufism and Wicca); and third, in discussion of world festivals (for example, from Divali and Hannukah to Mardi Gras and Yom Kippur). Religious and secular variants get objective treatment under topics like pilgrimage and scepticism, magic and asceticism. The central area of “ritual and rite” itself is well covered (initiation and divination, exorcism and healing, marriage and ordeals, puberty and sacrifice, scatology and taboo), providing any teacher or lecturer with a useful body of themes for preparing a short course or a student assignment using library resources.
It is a work that has set realistic boundaries for itself, feeling out into magic and witchcraft, sport and ritual, the calendar and music, sacred places and online worship and Star Trek conventions, and taking account both of formal (religious and secular ritual) and the personal rituals of everyday life. Anthropologists will recognize the topical interest in states of consciousness (in entries like altered states of consciousness, body and rituals, possession and trance, and in further entries like rites of passage). Observations (rather than criticisms) on the book would include its North American emphasis (but not something to preclude effective use in any English‐language setting), possible questions about spending money on a work that may lack a distinctive religious perspective (for, say, college libraries serving sectarian interests), and the inevitable challenge of satisfying a world of experts any one of whom might want more religion, fewer festivals, more cultural studies, more straight anthropology, more folklore, and the like. This encyclopedia, like others in its series, does not pretend to be all things to all readers, but more to bring together a wide array of themes and issues, under a workable banner, for practical use in a learning and library environment. Because of what it is, it picks up on topics and connections likely to be missed by less cross‐disciplinary works, and, at its level (college, school, early stages of university courses), it works very well indeed.
