Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: OUP, 2009
Price: £15.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780199733620

Catherine Bell was until her early death in 2008 one of the world’s leading scholars of ritual. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, first published nearly two decades ago, has become a cross-disciplinary modern classic in anthropology, sociology and the history of religion.

Bell spends some time working though 19th- and 20th-century theories of ritual, showing their weaknesses. Her main contribut­ion is to insist on looking at not just the act of ritual but the acting, the active participation of people in the practice: ritualis­ation rather than ritual. Ritual, she argues, should not be isolated from the context of social activity. In the third part of the book, she explores ritual in the context of negotiated power relationships.

This is not a beginner’s book; Bell’s writing is often dense and she assumes prior knowledge. She doesn’t propose a new theory, but attempts to “forge a framework for reanalysing the types of activ­ities usually understood as ritual”. This is a valuable progression from Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard and the other theorists in this field.