Matt Tomlinson, “Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance” (Oxford UP, 2014)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jan 6, 2015 · 1h 2m

Religious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of four case studies drawn from his fieldwork in Fiji. Each one illustrates a component of what Tomlinson calls ritual entextualization, the process by which discourse becomes texts that are detachable from their original contexts and thus replicable. Through this framework, Tomlinson explores how rituals are patterned, repeated events that are also…