abstract: This thesis examines the jazz jam session’s function in the constitution of jazz scenes as well as the identities of the musicians who participate in them. By employing ritual and performance studies theories of liminality, I demonstrate ways in which jazz musicians, jam sessions, and other social structures are mobilized and transformed during their social and musical interactions. I interview three prominent members of the jazz scene in the greater Phoenix area, and incorporate my experience as a professional jazz musician in the same scene, to conduct a contextually and socially embedded analysis in order to draw broader conclusions about jam sessions in general. In this analysis I refer to other ethnomusicologists who research improvisation, jazz in ritual context, and interactions, such as Ingrid Monson, Samuel Floyd, Travis Jackson, and Paul Berliner, as well as ideas proposed by phenomenologically adjacent thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Karen Barad. This thesis attempts to contribute to current jam session research in fields such as ethnomusicology and jazz studies by offering a perspective on jam sessions based on phenomenology and process philosophy, concluding that the jam session is an essential mechanism in the ongoing social and musical developments of jazz musicians and their scene. I also attempt to continue and develop the discourse surrounding theories of liminality in performance and ritual studies by underscoring the web of relations in social structures that are brought into contact with one another during the liminal performances of their acting agents. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Music 2019

Synchrony, or rhythmic bodily unison activities such as drumming or cadence marching, has attracted growing scholarly interest. Among laboratory subjects, synchrony elicits prosocial responses, including altruism and empathy. In light of such findings, researchers in social psychology and the bio-cultural study of religion have suggested that synchrony played a role in humanity’s evolutionary history by engendering collectivistic commitments and social cohesion. These models propose that synchrony enhances cohesion by making people feel united. However, such models overlook the importance of differentiated social relations, such as hierarchies. This dissertation builds on this insight by drawing on neuroscience, coordination dynamics, social psychology, anthropology, and ritual studies to generate a complex model of synchrony, ritual, and social hierarchy, which is then tested in an experimental study. In the hypothesized model, shared motor unison suppresses the brain’s ability to distinguish cognitively between self-caused and exogenous motor acts, resulting in subjective self-other overlap. During synchrony each participant is dynamically entrained to a group mean rhythm; this “immanent authority” prevents any one participant from unilaterally dictating the rhythm, flattening relative hierarchy. As a ritualized behavior, synchrony therefore paradigmatically evokes shared ideals of equality and unity. However, when lab participants were assigned to either a synchrony or asynchrony manipulation and given a collaborative task requiring complex coordination, synchrony predicted a marginally lower degree of collaboration and significantly lower interpersonal satisfaction. These findings imply that unity and equality can undercut group cohesion if the collective agenda is a shared goal that requires interpersonal coordination. My results emphasize that, despite the inevitable tensions associated with social hierarchy, complementary roles and hierarchy are vital for certain aspects of social cohesion. Ritual and convention institute social boundaries that can be adroitly negotiated, even as egalitarian effervescence such as communitas (in the sense of Victor Turner) facilitates social unity and inspires affective commitments. These findings corroborate theories in ritual studies and sociology that caution both against excessive emphasis on inner emotive states (such as empathy) and against excessively rigid conventions or roles. An organic balance between unity and functional differentiation is vital for genuinely robust, long-term social cohesion. / 2018-06-21T00:00:00Z

This thesis is the result of a concern over ‘being church’ in a multicultural setting, in accordance with the aphorism ‘Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex (con)vivendi’ (cf. Smit 2004). The urban setting of the City of Centurion, in Gauteng Province, The Republic of South Africa, displays a diversity of cultures, languages and individuals in relation with one another. South Africans, as a nation, are still learning to live together (lex (con)vivendi), in unity and inclusivity, some two decades after the birth of democracy in a post-Apartheid context. This context cannot be overlooked, neither can the multicultural context of urban South Africa. Therefore, the research question of this thesis is: how does the form and content of prayer impact the ways in which people connect with God and other people? In the first chapter, the research problem was stated. The second chapter described theory relevant to the research project as well as the research methodology. In the third chapter, the qualitative research data was described. Chapter four involved drawing on theories from various arts and sciences to interpret the empirical data. The fifth chapter considered theological concepts that would aid in developing ethical norms and learning from ‘good practice’. The sixth, and final chapter, formed a pragmatic response by means of suggesting a new theory for praxis. The suggested theory for praxis involves the liturgical inculturation process of continual critical-reciprocal interactions between liturgy and culture, with the inclusion of focussing on the concepts of unity and inclusivity. This should then aid the worshippers’ unity and inclusivity in ‘being church’, in living together — with one another (lex (con)vivendi) in a multicultural setting. Key terms: Liturgy; Liturgical inculturation; Culture; Prayer; Ritual; Ritualisation; Inclusivity; Unity; Practical Theology; Ecclesiology. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / Practical Theology / PhD / Unrestricted

Este trabalho analisa três peças de Brian Friel - The Enemy Within (1962), Faith Healer (1979) e Dancing at Lughnassa (1990) escritas em um intervalo de quase trinta anos. Nossa tese é de que Friel escreve as três peças como rituais, o que, por sua vez, retira da concepção elaborada pelos ritualistas de Cambridge, na década de 1920, de que a tragédia grega e o drama se desenvolveram a partir dos rituais de fertilidade. Notamos que a influência da tragédia e dos rituais em Friel está consideravelmente mais vinculada à forma e à abordagem das peças enquanto um ritual que à reescritura de tragédias gregas ou mitos, muito embora alusões sejam recorrentes. Friel retrabalha mitos e rituais a fim de refazer e atualizar o drama enquanto um ritual em si mesmo, cuja razão de ser é permitir a significação e reorganização da vida individual e social no mundo moderno industrial, no caso específico, a vida na Irlanda contemporânea. Ocupamo-nos dos dramas sociais e dos rituais de passagem, com atenção especial ao período liminar, caracterizado pela transição entre papéis sociais envolvendo um período de não-pertencimento. Os três grupos envolvidos em cada uma das peças: os monges e noviços em The Enemy Within, a pequena trupe mambembe em Faith Healer e a família em Dancing at Lughnasa, vivem na periferia de suas sociedades sendo liderados por figuras vivendo uma situação liminar participando de dramas sociais que envolvem processos rituais tanto formais como não-institucionalizados. / This work addresses three plays by Brian Friel - The Enemy Within (1962), Faith Healer (1979) and Dancing at Lughnassa (1990) - written within a period of almost thirty years. Our thesis is that Friel writes all three plays as rituals, a conception taken from the Cambridge Ritualists, who in the 1920s assume that Greek tragedy and drama grew out of the ancient fertility rituals. We notice that the influence of tragedy and rituals on Friel\'s work is more connected to the form and approach to the plays as rituals than to the rewriting of Greek tragedies or myths. Friel reworks myths and rituals in order to update and remake drama as a ritual in itself, whose raison d\'etre for him is to allow the meaning and reorganization of individual and social life in modern industrial world, mainly life in contemporary Ireland. We deal here with social dramas and rites of passage, with special regard to the liminal period, characterized by the transition between social roles and involving a period of not belonging. The three groups involved in each play: the monks and novices in The Enemy Within, the small troupe in Faith Healer and the family in Dancing at Lughnasa, live on the boundaries of their societies and are led by men who are in a liminal situation in social dramas which involve both institutionalized and informal ritual processes.

Este trabalho analisa três peças de Brian Friel - The Enemy Within (1962), Faith Healer (1979) e Dancing at Lughnassa (1990) escritas em um intervalo de quase trinta anos. Nossa tese é de que Friel escreve as três peças como rituais, o que, por sua vez, retira da concepção elaborada pelos ritualistas de Cambridge, na década de 1920, de que a tragédia grega e o drama se desenvolveram a partir dos rituais de fertilidade. Notamos que a influência da tragédia e dos rituais em Friel está consideravelmente mais vinculada à forma e à abordagem das peças enquanto um ritual que à reescritura de tragédias gregas ou mitos, muito embora alusões sejam recorrentes. Friel retrabalha mitos e rituais a fim de refazer e atualizar o drama enquanto um ritual em si mesmo, cuja razão de ser é permitir a significação e reorganização da vida individual e social no mundo moderno industrial, no caso específico, a vida na Irlanda contemporânea. Ocupamo-nos dos dramas sociais e dos rituais de passagem, com atenção especial ao período liminar, caracterizado pela transição entre papéis sociais envolvendo um período de não-pertencimento. Os três grupos envolvidos em cada uma das peças: os monges e noviços em The Enemy Within, a pequena trupe mambembe em Faith Healer e a família em Dancing at Lughnasa, vivem na periferia de suas sociedades sendo liderados por figuras vivendo uma situação liminar participando de dramas sociais que envolvem processos rituais tanto formais como não-institucionalizados. / This work addresses three plays by Brian Friel - The Enemy Within (1962), Faith Healer (1979) and Dancing at Lughnassa (1990) - written within a period of almost thirty years. Our thesis is that Friel writes all three plays as rituals, a conception taken from the Cambridge Ritualists, who in the 1920s assume that Greek tragedy and drama grew out of the ancient fertility rituals. We notice that the influence of tragedy and rituals on Friel\'s work is more connected to the form and approach to the plays as rituals than to the rewriting of Greek tragedies or myths. Friel reworks myths and rituals in order to update and remake drama as a ritual in itself, whose raison d\'etre for him is to allow the meaning and reorganization of individual and social life in modern industrial world, mainly life in contemporary Ireland. We deal here with social dramas and rites of passage, with special regard to the liminal period, characterized by the transition between social roles and involving a period of not belonging. The three groups involved in each play: the monks and novices in The Enemy Within, the small troupe in Faith Healer and the family in Dancing at Lughnasa, live on the boundaries of their societies and are led by men who are in a liminal situation in social dramas which involve both institutionalized and informal ritual processes.

Based on three and a half years of research among semi-cloistered Christian monastics and a dispersed network of non-monastic Christian contemplatives around the United States, this study shows how religious practitioners in both settings combined social action and intentional living with intellectual study and intensive contemplative practices in an effort to modify their ways of knowing, sensing, and experiencing the world. It explores the interplay of social diversity and cohesiveness in pluralistic society and the relationship of agency and habitus in practitioners' conscious attempts at spiritual transformation. Organized by the metaphor of a seeker journeying towards the inner chambers of a monastic chapel, The Porous Cell uses innovative "intersubjective" fieldwork methods to study these opaque interiorized, often silent communities, in order to show how solitude, chant, contemplation, attention, and a paradoxical capacity to combine active ritual with intentional "unknowing" develop and hone a powerful sense of communion and foster a unitive state in relationship to "life in the world." Cloistered monastics encouraged a commitment to ancient Christian ideals and practices, but both they and dispersed non-monastics enriched the movement's character by including aspects of other religious traditions. Partially inspired by Fredrik Barth's anthropology of knowledge, the thesis develops a novel theory of clines of multiple epistemologies, which include intellectual, experiential, performative, and contemplative knowledges, as well as the notion of "unknowing." This model of variable knowledges (both conscious and "embodied") shows how contemplative communities can be diverse and yet retain considerable cohesiveness and stability. American Christian contemplatives' ability to fuse so many spheres of knowledge and to live contemplatively challenges the often taken-for-granted segregation of the religious, secular, sacred, and profane in the modern world. Further, this study contributes to the anthropologies of perception, silence, embodiment, and experience, and to the anthropology and epistemology of Christianity. It extends American ethnography by its use of new methods for studying silence and performance, and by focusing on a highly educated and mostly urban, professional, Euro-American community (in both its geographically-situated and "non-gathered," network-based guises) which is rarely the subject of ethnographic research and is often assumed to be the demographic most likely to reject religion. / 2022-08-01T00:00:00Z

This thesis aims to explain how politics in 14th century Scandinavia were structured by a set of rules or norms of conduct – rules which were neither codified nor enforced by any outside agency, yet had a very real impact on the patterns by which political action was conducted. Taking inspiration from historical anthropology, the study sets out to analyze the ways in which political tensions and relationships, primarily within the royal elite, were negotiated in various situations. The source material – mainly letters of treaties, but also contemporary literary sources – are treated as remains of political communication within a common discursive framework. The findings of the study go against some established notions about politics in the 14th century that are prevalent in current Scandinavian research. On the whole, patterns of political behaviour during the period show great similarities to those of the earlier Middle Ages, despite the discontinuity implied by the idea of the 13th century as the era of "state formation" in Scandinavia. Rather, the kings and princes of the 14th century appear to have been ruled by quite similar norms of behaviour to those of their predecessors, albeit on a more complex scale. The concepts of peace and justice are shown to have been central to the way that political action was legitimized. No functional difference can be shown to have been made between "feudal" or personal relations, and those of the state. Peace was conceived as a state of harmony, which could only be achieved through the establishment of mutual positive bonds, and an active striving for justice. The latter was achieved, both with the aid of mediators and negotiators, and through the demonstration of force, in patterns largely similar to the practice of feuding. Likewise, acts of supplication and reconciliation are shown to have played an active part in the way that political relations were reified during the process of ending an armed conflict.

Machine learning is increasingly involved in both our production and consumption of video. One symptom of this is the appearance of automated video editing applications. As this technology spreads rapidly to consumers, the need for substantive research about its social impact grows. To this end, this project maintains a focus on video editing as a microcosm of larger shifts in cultural objects co-authored by artificial intelligence. The window in which this research occurred (2010-2015) saw machine learning move increasingly into the public eye, and with it ethical concerns. What follows is, on the most abstract level, a discussion of why these ethical concerns are particularly urgent in the realm of the moving image. Algorithmic editing consists of software instructions to automate the creation of timelines of moving images. The criteria that this software uses to query a database is variable. Algorithmic authorship already exists in other media, but I will argue that the moving image is a separate case insofar as the raw material of text and music software can develop on its own. The performance of a trained actor can still not be generated by software. Thus, my focus is on the relationship between live embodied performance, and the subsequent algorithmic editing of that footage. This is a process that can employ other software like computer vision (to analyze the content of video) and predictive analytics (to guess what kind of automated film to make for a given user). How is performance altered when it has to communicate to human and non-human alike? The ritual of the iterative frame gives literal form to something that throughout human history has been a projection: the omniscient participant observer, more commonly known as the Divine. We experience black boxed software (AI's, specifically neural networks, which are intrinsically opaque) as functionally omniscient and tacitly allow it to edit more and more of life (e.g. filtering articles, playlists and even potential spouses). As long as it remains disembodied, we will continue to project the Divine on to the black box, causing cultural anxiety. In other words, predictive analytics alienate us from the source code of our cultural texts. The iterative frame then is a space in which these forces can be inscribed on the body, and hence narrated. The algorithmic editing of content is already taken for granted. The editing of moving images, in contrast, still requires a human hand. We need to understand the social power of moving image editing before it is delegated to automation. Practice Section: This project is practice-led, meaning that the portfolio of work was produced as it was being theorized. To underscore this, the portfolio comes at the end of the document. Video editors use artificial intelligence (AI) in a number of different applications, from deciding the sequencing of timelines to using facial and language detection to find actors in archives. This changes traditional production workflows on a number of levels. How can the single decision cut a between two frames of video speak to the larger epistemological shifts brought on by predictive analytics and Big Data (upon which they rely)? When predictive analytics begin modeling the world of moving images, how will our own understanding of the world change? In the practice-based section of this thesis, I explore how these shifts will change the way in which actors might approach performance. What does a gesture mean to AI and how will the editor decontextualize it? The set of a video shoot that will employ an element of AI in editing represents a move towards ritualization of production, summarized in the term the 'iterative frame'. The portfolio contains eight works that treat the set was taken as a microcosm of larger shifts in the production of culture. There is, I argue, metaphorical significance in the changing understanding of terms like 'continuity' and 'sync' on the AI-watched set. Theory Section In the theoretical section, the approach is broadly comparative. I contextualize the current dynamic by looking at previous shifts in technology that changed the relationship between production and post-production, notably the lightweight recording technology of the 1960s. This section also draws on debates in ethnographic filmmaking about the matching of film and ritual. In this body of literature, there is a focus on how participant observation can be formalized in film. Triangulating between event, participant observer and edit grammar in ethnographic filmmaking provides a useful analogy in understanding how AI as film editor might function in relation to contemporary production. Rituals occur in a frame that is dependent on a spatially/temporally separate observer. This dynamic also exists on sets bound for post-production involving AI, The convergence of film grammar and ritual grammar occurred in the 1960s under the banner of cinéma vérité in which the relationship between participant observer/ethnographer and the subject became most transparent. In Rouch and Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961), reflexivity became ritualized in the form of on-screen feedback sessions. The edit became transparent-the black box of cinema disappeared. Today as artificial intelligence enters the film production process this relationship begins to reverse-feedback, while it exists, becomes less transparent. The weight of the feedback ritual gets gradually shifted from presence and production to montage and post-production. Put differently, in cinéma vérité, the participant observer was most present in the frame. As participant observation gradually becomes shared with code it becomes more difficult to give it an embodied representation and thus its presence is felt more in the edit of the film. The relationship between the ritual actor and the participant observer (the algorithm) is completely mediated by the edit, a reassertion of the black box, where once it had been transparent. The crucible for looking at the relationship between algorithmic editing, participant observation and the black box is the subject in trance. In ritual trance the individual is subsumed by collective codes. Long before the advent of automated editing trance was an epistemological problem posed to film editing. In the iterative frame, for the first time, film grammar can echo ritual grammar and indeed become continuous with it. This occurs through removing the act of cutting from the causal world, and projecting this logic of post-production onto performance. Why does this occur? Ritual and specifically ritual trance is the moment when a culture gives embodied form to what it could not otherwise articulate. The trance of predictive analytics-the AI that increasingly choreographs our relationship to information-is the ineffable that finds form in the iterative frame. In the iterative frame a gesture never exists in a single instance, but in a potential state. The performers in this frame begin to understand themselves in terms of how automated indexing processes reconfigure their performance. To the extent that gestures are complicit with this mode of databasing they can be seen as votive toward the algorithmic. The practice section focuses on the poetics of this position. Chapter One focuses on cinéma vérité as a moment in which the relationship between production and post-production shifted as a function of more agile recording technology, allowing the participant observer to enter the frame. This shift becomes a lens to look at changes that AI might bring. Chapter Two treats the work of Pierre Huyghe as a 'liminal phase' in which a new relationship between production and post-production is explored. Finally, Chapter Three looks at a film in which actors perform with awareness that footage will be processed by an algorithmic edit. / The conclusion looks at the implications this way of relating to AI-especially commercial AI-through embodied performance could foster a more critical relationship to the proliferating black-boxed modes of production.

Studien syftar till att analysera sanfolkets existentiella riter och transformativa processer ur ett dramapedagogiskt perspektiv. Bakgrunden avgränsas till att undersöka och redogöra för Ju/’hoansifolkets etnografi, kosmologi samt riter med fokusering på de transformativa processerna. Metodansatsen är en aletisk och objektiverande hermeneutik med ett abduktivt tillvägagångsätt. Tidigare forskning belyser det antropologiska perspektivet på riter, Ju/’hoansis ontologiska transformationer samt beröringspunkterna mellan antropologi och teater. Den teoretiska referensramen redogör för det dramapedagogiska paradigmet och dess olika tolkningar på transformativa och kommunikativa kunskapsprocesser. I analysen redovisas resultatet med hjälp av rotmetaforer med den mest framstående korrelationen; den ontologiska pluralismen. Genom analysen framträdde även ett övergripande tema av det upplevelsebaserade kontinuumet. Resultatet och metodansatsen revideras i diskussionen. / The study aims to analyze the existential rites and transformative processes of the san people from a drama educational perspective. The background is constrained to examining and describing the Ju/’hoansi people's ethnography, cosmology and rites with a focus on the transformative processes. The method approach is alethic and objectifying hermeneutics with an abductive reasoning. Previous research sheds light on the anthropological perspective on rituals, Ju/’hoansi’s ontological transformations and the points of contact between anthropology and theatre. The theoretical frame of reference describes the drama educational paradigm and its different interpretations of transformative and communicative learning processes. In the analysis, the results are reported using root metaphors with the most prominent correlation; the ontological pluralism. Through the analysis, an overarching theme of the experience-based continuum also emerged. The result and the method approach are revised in the discussion.

In the years since Mao Zedongs death, the people of China have been impelled to reevaluate the legacy and character of their still iconic leader. One of the more notable trends in this process of posthumous reevaluation is the tendency of some individuals and groups (most often, the rural peasantry) to interpret the deceased Chairman along theological lines, assuming that his still efficacious spirit will provide protection and good fortune to those who honour him.<p>In exploring the genesis (and continued salience) of these beliefs and practices, the present research delves into popular Chinese religiosity, exploring the porosity of the traditional cosmology, the centrality of perceived spiritual efficacy (ling) in determining the popularity of religious cults, and the theological and cosmological resonances extant within traditional understandings of political leadership. The body of metaphors, narratives, and tropes drawn from this historical overview are then applied to popular characterizations of Mao, with the resulting correspondences helping to explicate the salience of these modern religious interpretations. To further investigate the source of Maos persistent symbolic capital, the present research also explores the role of Cultural Revolution-era ritual in valorizing and reifying the power and efficacy then popularly ascribed to the Great Helmsmans person and teachings. This studys conclusion, in brief, is that participants in the posthumous cult of Mao are utilizing these cultural materials in both traditional and creative ways, and that such interpretations speak to the exigencies of life in the turbulent, ideologically ambiguous culture of modern China. <p>In performing this evaluation, the present research makes use of the standard phenomenological/historiographic approach of religious studies scholarship, though it is also informed by narrative methods, cognitive science, and current perspectives on the role and function of ritual. In particular, the analysis of Mao-era rituals (as a source of Maos continued symbolic potency) is performed using the cognivistic typology of ritual proposed by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, with additional materials drawn from the research of Catherine Bell, Roy Rappaport, Pascal Boyer and Adam Chau.