Summary Of The Archeology Of Ritual By Edward Swenson

In The Archeology of Ritual by Edward Swenson, it is noted that there is an archaeological deposits of ritual nature in “interpret[ing] power relations, struggles over identity, social transformation, experiences of place and time, and cultural constructions of ecology, community, and personhood” (Swenson 2015:330). It is seen as paradoxical to view ritual as social control as it is an old view that ritual only reflects and authorize sociopolitical orders, as ritual is now connected to social, cognitive, and symbolic. The heuristic worth of ritual was questioned, and religion was studied specifically as a class of innovation that has twisted and simplified past social practices (Swenson 2015:332). Archaeologists argued that the specific exercises

It is noted that rituals are like specialized actions about the world, which involves commitment and participation to action (Swenson 2015:333). As it is accepted that ritual is a practice with its own conventions, it is easier to understand the any occurrences and why it is related to many different involvement (Swenson 2015:333). It is concluded that transformations in ritual regimes “cannot… be interpreted as ‘sensitive indicators’ of sociopolitical and economic change” (Swenson 2015:340). Ritual as a substitute in the material framing of practice does not hinder the idea that “structuring effects, meanings, and political affordances of ritualized acts can be interpreted only in relationship to the entire field of social action” (Swenson 2015:340), which shows that ritual can be analyzed as a historically particular experience through the focus of ritual as a “materially marked process” (Swenson

According to Edward Swenson, the diverse effects and the contradictory meanings are the consequences of “intensified material, sensual, and emotional experiences generated by the ritualized framing of social action” (Swenson 2015:334), which showcases the the material force of ritual performance in religious and ceremonial events (CITE). In relation to power, ritual performances had a fundamental activities in power, depending on the “individual person, the larger social collective, or the cosmos” (Swenson 2015:334). The potential of ritual occurrences “to sway cosmic forces and (re)structure political relations is exemplified by the bundling of ether dialectically antithetical or mimetically linked entities” (Swenson 2015:337), which relates to the the depositing materials that constituted “a performance in its own right and played an important role in the creation in past societies” (Swenson