This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet.

Tārā is arguably the most popular goddess of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. She is well known in her Green, White, and Twenty-one forms. However, the numerous red aspects of the divinity have long been overlooked in both popular and academic literature on the goddess. This thesis aims to redress this balance. This thesis presents the various manifestations of Red Tārā in the form of a survey of the literary and practice lineages of this goddess throughout Tibetan Buddhist history. The intention of the thesis is to examine individual forms of Red Tārā, excluding Kurukullā (who has received previous scholarly attention), in order to prove the hypothesis that not all Red Tārās are Kurukullā. The research has identified a preliminary historical order of Red Tārā lineages from the eleventh century works on Pītheśvarī and the Sa-skya-pa Red Tārās, through to the nineteenth and twentieth century forms of the goddess authored by the dGe-lugs-pas and A-paṃ gter-ston in the A-mdo region of Tibet. The red forms of Tārā are more 'worldly' than her Green or White incarnations, and the soteriological component of her worship is not always clear. Accordingly this allows a glimpse into the subjugating/ magnetising ritual process. The thesis comprises three sections. Section One provides a general introduction to Tārā and Kurukullā, followed by a survey of the literature pertaining to Red Tārā identified in the course of this research. Section Two takes four lineages of Red Tārā literature as its focus. Each chapter refers to an individual lineage: Pītheśvarī, Sa-skya-pa, the Twenty-one Tārās, and A-paṃ gter-ton's gter-ma cycle. Section Three deals with modern-day practice of the goddess in the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation and the Flaming Jewel Sangha. The thesis relies on translation of primary sources from the Tibetan language, participant observation, and New Religious Studies methodology, and covers a wide range of areas including subjugation rituals, iconography, body-maṇḍala rituals, the adoption of Buddhism in the West, and New Religious Movements. It adds to current knowledge in a variety of fields including ritual, goddess studies, the Tibetan pantheon and its iconography, and Buddhism in the West.

Though both literary critics and anthropologists have sometimes recognized converging aims and methods between ethnography and narrative fiction, few interpretive studies of fiction have been undertaken using the framework of ethnography of communication. Because ethnography of communication centers attention on language in situated communicative interaction, it could be a useful tool for exploring literary texts, especially texts within the genre of "realistic fiction," which sometimes also depend upon observation or creation of situated social interaction. This dissertation uses ethnography of communication to interpret a Victorian novel, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ethnography of communication may also serve as a general framework for teaching literature, combining close linguistic or stylistic analysis of the language, detailed examination of the cultural and social situation, and re-creation of the meaning of the event as it may have been experienced by the participants. This approach may be especially appropriate in the case of L2 learners taking literature courses in university programs. The overall framework of the analysis, ethnography of communication, will be supplemented by Goffman's model of interaction ritual and the concept of co-construction of reality. These frameworks will be employed in the analysis of brief communicative events within the novel. Insights about the characters and the speech communities deriving from ethnographic interpretation will be used to build more precise understanding of the events of the novel, thereby contributing to traditional areas of literary criticism, and offering options for literary study in L1 and L2 contexts.

This thesis explores the social construction of birth by analyzing the interaction between the participants present in the delivery room. The data is drawn from 79 video recordings of birth. Six are unedited research recordings and the remaining 73 were edited for pedagogical, documentary and entertaining purposes. The theoretical and analytical perspective is Conversation Analysis. With this microanalytic method, a detailed insight is given to the interaction in the delivery room which should be of linguistic, anthropologic and midwifery interest. The thesis demonstrates how different situations are shaped during labor and the first 15 minutes after birth. It reveals how the identities child, girl, boy, mother, father, woman and man are constructed and negotiated in the unfolding interaction between the participants. In this sense, the thesis uncovers the construction of family roles in the delivery room during a delicate interaction between the private persons and the institutional representatives. The latter are charged with the complex task of safeguarding the physical wellbeing of mother and child while also promoting the development of parental identities. The thesis highlights the existence of a social birth work; the institutional interactants make use of a range of linguistic resources to demarcate the progression from second stage labor to birth and to position the newborn as an endeared social creature. Birth is an important liminal situation and is therefore forcefully spoken forth, and, as the thesis shows, enhanced with more or less ritual utterances and actions. Birth is also a matter of bodies, the body in labor, the supporting body of the partner and the appearance of the body of the newborn. The thesis gives insight into how these bodies are managed and stylized in interaction. Further the thesis makes visible the midwife’s use of interactional resources to instill strength into the body of the woman in labor. The results are discussed in light of the socio-cultural circumstances for hospital birth in Sweden.

This visual ethnography is an interactive, online, multimedia project that explores female funeral celebrant perspectives on communicating with members of the general public who are immersed in liminal states of consciousness during the process of bereavement. Non-representational theory is incorporated to afford better understanding of female funeral celebrant communication practices. The multimedia project is made up of select video and audio clips taken from in-depth interviews completed with four female funeral celebrants in British Columbia, Canada about their specialized communication work. Favourite poetry and quotes from celebrants are included. Three main themes emerge as central to funeral celebrant work: witnessing, following and engaging with the process; the limen as creative source --- companioning mourners at the threshold; and the art of (irretrievable) performance through facilitating affective, participatory ritual. These same themes are reflected in the interactive, multimedia visual ethnography, which may be engaged with here: http://prezi.com/w85_hps4acf1/between-worlds-communication-perspectives-of-female-funeral-celebrants-in-british-columbia/?auth_key=7536c83649629fcf0547168f04462c8f089a6179

Darbe analizuojami politiniai ritualai viešosiose miestų erdvėse, išskiriant teatrinių ir performatyvių elementų vaidmenį. Pirmojoje darbo dalyje apibrėžiamo politiniai ritualai ir pristatomi pagrindiniai jų analizės aspektai. Politiniai ritualai apibrėžiami kaip sekuliarūs ritualai, kuriais siekiama su valdžia, galios santykių performavimu susijusių tikslų. Taip pat politiniams ritualams būdinga tai, kad jie yra organizuota (vykstanti pagal tam tiktas taisykles, struktūruota) veikla, vykstanti specifinėje vietoje ir specifiniu laiku, suteikianti papildomą vertę naudojamiems objektams, nekurianti materialios naudos, kartojama (t.y. tradicijos palaikoma ir ją kurianti) bei atliekama turint tikslą. Taip pat išskiriami ir pasirinktai analizei išskirtinai svarbūs politinio ritualo bruožai - teatrališkumas bei performatyvumas. Pristačius teorinę prieigą, darbe toliau analizuojami konkretūs politiniai ritualai. Antra darbo dalis skirta valstybės šventėms. Valstybės šventės apibrėžiamos kaip oficialią politiką reprezentuojantis politinis ritualas, analizuojamas performatyvių ir teatrališkų elementų vaidmuo minint vasario 16ąją, kovo 11-ąją, liepos 6-ąją. Trečiame skyriuje analizuojamas kitas pasirinktas pavyzdys – eitynės. Jos veikia labiau kaip žanras, suteikiantis ritualo bruožų visiems juo besinaudojantiems. Konkrečių eitynių analizei pasirinktos skirtingas pažiūras, skirtingą santykį su valdžia demonstruojančios eitynės: patriotų eitynės „Tėvynei“, stačiatikių arkivyskupijos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Thesis deals with political rituals in public city spaces extra focus lying on their theatrical and performative elements. First chapter of the thesis presents definition of political rituals. Political rituals are defined as secular, designed to gain or reconstruct power relations. Political rituals are also described as organized, taking part in specific environment on specific time, creating symbolical value for used objects and participants, not producing material value, repeated, purposeful activity. Separately are describes theatricality and performativity of public political rituals. After presenting theory examples are analyzed. Second part of thesis deals with state holidays. After showing that they can be regarded as political ritual, theatricality and performativity of February 16th, March 11th and July 6th are analyzed. Third part of the thesis goes on to analyze processions. Procession can be described as a genre. Using form of procession almost automatically makes an event ritualized. Further are analyzed processions that represent different political views and relations to official state politics: patriotic procession “For Homeland”, Christian procession “For Life” and procession for Tax freedom day organized by Liberal and centre union. In order to have broader perspective on how aesthetics, performativity and politics interact, fourth part of the thesis deals with political performance art, which uses elements of ritual or is ritualized by repeating it... [to full text]

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1994.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This essay takes its start in the problematic situation concerning source material in the study of the Norse religion before the Christianization of Scandinavia. There is a lack of written sources from the time when the religion was still practiced. There are plenty of archeological sources economic situation than their religious beliefs. The Icelandic stories written in the 13th and 14th centuries give us a broad pictureof the Norse mythology, but the writers were Christians which makes their reliability questionable. The focus of this essay is therefore on two texts written during the time when the Norse religion was still in practice. The first source is the travel notes written in 922 by the Muslim scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan who met a group of the Rus’ people. The Rus’ were mainly Scandinavians (possibly from Sweden) and their religious practices hence falls under the category of Norse religion. Ibn Fadlan showed a great interest in the Rus’ and describes their ritual sacrifices and a funeral of theirs in great detail. The second source is the description of the heathen cult in the Swedish town of Uppsala written in 1076 by the Christian scholar Adam of Bremen. He describes Uppsala as the last outpost of the religion and among other things he describes their practices, their ritual sacrifices and a golden temple. I’ve used a comparative method as well as a historical critical method in order to findcredible similarities between the two sources. The focus is placed on the descriptions of the ritual sacrifices in both of the texts and how they can be understood in their context. This is done to find a common ground within the religion in order to construct a framework from which further research may find its foundation. With the help from earlier research on these two texts, on other written material, such as thethe Icelandic stories, and on archeological findings I’ve found many similarities between my two sources which can be considered as real parts of the Norse religion. These are the sacrifice to images of the gods, the sacrifice of different animals, the sacrifice in sacred groves and the hanging of scarified animals in trees and on treelike poles, the central role of sacrificing heads of animals and different ritual practices in order to experience a higher reality. Human sacrifice can be strongly questioned and both of the texts point to hanging as a mean of execution instead of sacrifice.

In this thesis, I show how a current radio program, War of the Roses, acts as a ritual of shaming that affirms the social order as moral order, involving moral condemnation, degradation of social identity, and public embarrassment (Goffman, 1956, 1967; Turner 1987). I use discourse analysis (DA) (e.g., Bergmann, 1998; Tracy, 2001; Tracy & Mirivel, 2008) and membership categorization analysis (Baker, 2000; Roulston, 2001) to examine eight transcripts from multiple versions of the War of the Roses radio program across the country. The basic premise of the radio program War of Roses involves a "caller" who suspects her or his partner of infidelity colluding with the radio DJ to devise a test to confirm whether or not the partner is in fact "cheating" on the relationship. The sequencing of the show inevitably involves exposing and confronting the cheater with their infidelity, and embarrassing the cheater in the public forum of the radio medium. Specifically, I trace how morality is enacted as a dynamic of talk-in-interaction, which requires a negotiation and authorization of claims, and involves differential access on the part of the DJ, the "cheater," and the victim to the social discourse of shaming and embarrassment.