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Chapter 7 describes the history and contemporary standing of a political ritual practiced in most Japanese Zen monasteries and temples today. This hour long ritual—Shukushin (Invoking the Sage)—is performed at least twenty‐six times each year throughout Japan. The concept of the sage can be traced back from classical Daoism and the practice of rituals on behalf of the well‐being and long life of the emperor through early Chinese Buddhist sources up through the Sung dynasty Ch'an school. Describing the ritual as it is performed today in Japan, the essay shows how continuity of ritual tradition is maintained in Zen even into the postwar era in which the emperor's role in maintaining the prosperity and well‐being of the nation is minimal.

This chapter turns to the court's patronage of shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, and to its pursuit of a multicultural policy directed at different subject peoples in the empire. Shamanism was the avowed traditional belief system of the Manchus but originally focused on the resolution of individual problems. State shamanic rites developed as an alternative and counterpart to the Han Chinese political rituals. In the eighteenth century, the court attempted to preserve shamanic rituals through codification. Shamanism provided not only the foundation myths legitimating the Qing ruling house but also a cultural umbrella for integration of northeastern tribal groups. Tibetan Buddhism attracted Manchu rulers because it was the belief system of the Mongols and, in the seventeenth century, a key to supremacy in Inner Asia.

This chapter discusses violence against women in the context of broader pro-Beijing and pro-democracy movements. In Hong Kong, the significance of the political transition is apparent in the development of oppositional politics, characterized by movements enabling the collective contestation of economic and political power relations, organizing to articulate oppositional and competing frames of democracy, human rights, and feminism, and maintaining freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press. The Hong Kong Women's Coalition on Equal Opportunities is the most prominent coalition of rights-based, grassroots-oriented women's groups, albeit diverse feminist organizational forms, rhetoric, and strategies. In contrast, the Hong Kong Federation of Women unites and propagates patriotic and nationalist passions among women's groups. Both coalitions have common concerns about local women's issues but they rely on different economic, political, and social networks and employ opposing rhetoric and strategies. Given the hierarchical, corporatist dimensions of the Hong Kong government and its complex interactions with the Beijing government, feminist engagement with state institutions and processes is always combined with efforts to maintain broader transformatory struggle and movement-oriented activism.

The saint’s descendants became the ruling nawabs, several of whom had an enduring effect on Malerkotla. Their legacies will be discussed with a particular focus on Nawab Sher Muhammad Khan, who spoke up against the killing of the captured sons of the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh. The subsequent blessing of the guru is one of the best-known events in Malerkotlan history and is often credited with the town’s current interreligious peace. The nawab’s protest, known as the haah da naara or “cry for justice,” features prominently in political rituals, personal narratives, and regional histories, profoundly shaping the public perception of Malerkotla and its heritage.

This introductory chapter deconstructs the notion of democratization as a post-conflict operation geared toward peace, especially with regard to the political climate in Afghanistan. Democracy—and specifically the “political ritual” of holding elections—has become the default template for international interventions in peace-building. Yet in many instances, elections in Afghanistan have encouraged violence, stagnation, and the inequitable distribution of resources, conditions that most would consider very undemocratic. The problem here, however, lies in the failure to understand how Afghans perceive elections culturally. Sovereignty to the Afghans in particular entails the complex interactions of many different actors—such as tribal elders, the militia, merchants, party members, and so on—all of them engaged in enlarging their political capital by developing relations with government officials or institutions.

This chapter discusses freedom, representation, and forms of resistance, Cuban-style. It focuses in particular on common forms of “off-stage”, “backstage”, and at-home criticism, building on the improbability of large-scale protest or the development of powerful interest groups. This chapter also explains how forms of protest do not represent a unified, national opposition movement of any sustained potency. The discussion focuses on arguably the three common offstage forms of state criticism in Cuba: in-house protests to broadcasts of Fidel's televised speeches on TV; using metaphors and aphorisms among friends to criticize the socialist state; and withdrawal from state-orchestrated political rituals. These rituals include elections, political “debates”, and “citizen organizing”, focusing particularly on the practice of avoiding marches.

This chapter details how the śānti ritual was politicized in the arena of kingship (rājadharma). It examines a collection of ritual manuals (the Appendices of the Atharvaveda) for the royal chaplain (purohita) that evince the growth of Atharvan engagement with divination, and a consequent multiplication of occasions for śānti. Forming an early precursor to the Hindu calendar, these texts delineate the king’s ritual regime, which comes to be dominated by forms of repetitive bathing that incorporate other modes of ritual, such as gifting and sorcery. The Appendices thus represent the apex of a broader culture of ritual appeasement in the Atharvan tradition. This culture not only involves the technical expansion of śānti, but also its discursive potential as part of an encompassing theory of the state.

The conclusion reviews how a history of śānti rituals complicates our sense of the relationship between Vedism and Hinduism. Despite the drammatic religious changes that took hold in the post-Vedic period, Vedic orthopraxy, at least in the endurance of its ritual structures, nonethless constrained Hindu practice, especially in its highly public temple setting. The study also connects the medieval Brahmanical world to the ethnographic present. While relatively taciturn at the level of theoretical discourse, the ritual and astrological cultures of the royal and temple cults pose a striking countertext to the better-known Brahmanical discourses of Dharmaśāstra, and tend to align with recent ethnographic and ethnohistorical work on auspiciousness, kingship, and materiality. Finally, the study makes possible a critique of the well-known term, darśan (viewing an image), based on the priestly view of the royal body, arguing for a recontextualized and repoliticized view of image worship in Hinduism.

The navarātra is a nine-day festival held in the autumn. At the start of this festival, a yantra is consecrated in the same way that images are for the installation of a deity in them. This involves the first of the three kinds of homa included in the festival. This first wakes up the goddess residing within the yantra. The second involves the offering of a goat’s liver into the fire, and the last is used to empower weapons and other royal insignia. While the first opens the festival, the second takes place during the nights of the eighth and ninth days of the festival. This involves the sacrifice of a goat and feeding the goddess by offering the liver into the fire. The third homa is performed daily up to the eighth day of the festival.

This chapter examines the process of creating consensus in the Roman Empire. It investigates three social dramas that implicitly or explicitly invoked and expressed the consensus of the provincials and suggest that Rome invoked and sought consensus through means more disparate than communicative actions. It analyzes the use of acclamations to express consensus and the slow trend toward recording and publicizing acclamations and argues that each of these rather different political rituals strongly suggests that the Roman government could achieve consensus, as it defined that concept, only by developing and exploiting sophisticated mechanisms for the distribution of information.

The chapter’s analysis begins with its contention that one cannot understand the civil sphere without first understanding Alexander’s version of cultural sociology and of the significance he attaches to performance and political rituals. The chapter considers the two to be inextricably linked. In its analysis, the chapter stresses the centrality of performativity. This leads to identifying what it views as the three central shortcomings of the civil sphere project. First, it states Alexander exhibits a distinctly American optimism that does not resonate with the situation in Europe. Second, by focusing on dramatic political rituals, Alexander gives insufficient attention to public reasoning. Finally, he does not think the civil sphere is adequately defined.

This chapter discusses the new political ritual that visibly symbolized the transformations that woman suffrage had wrought on the South's leading men. It observes that southern politicians in the fall of 1920 confronted the most substantial change in southern politics since the Populist revolt of the late nineteenth century: faced with long lines of women registering to vote and the prospect of hundreds of thousands of new voters at the polls. The chapter also observes that unlike the growing force of discontent that characterized Populism, woman suffrage transformed an incredibly stable political status quo to a great political contest in just a few short weeks, as more than a million new voters suddenly took to southern polls. It observes that the South's political leaders changed their public attitudes swiftly once they stood before women voters as candidates.

The Roman Forum occupied a central place in the city of Rome. Crowded with monuments, civic buildings, and temples, the forum was a symbol of imperial power and culture, serving as stage for imperial celebrations and as a seat for the Senate. During the late antique period, this area continued to attract the attention of imperial visitors, local politicians, and the Roman people. This chapter analyses the series of physical transformations that redefined the area from the reign of Diocletian onwards, charting its transformation from an symbol of empire into an area dominated by structures associated with the presence of the Senate in the city. The redefinition of the forum involved the performance of rituals and festivals in the area, progressively associated with the local elite.

The introduction, “The Outskirts of the Nation,” introduces Karoland and its people through an account of Independence Day celebrations in the highland capital of Kabanjahé. Taking public sites of memory—a political ritual, a popular song, and a national cemetery—as points of departure is meant to deflect expectations of unmediated access to popular memory or to unambiguously autobiographical voices, but it is also meant to acknowledge Karo pride in their part in the nation’s founding.

As the 1550 Royal Entry in Rouen described in the opening of this chapter reveals, Renaissance and Early Modern France was home to a deeply ceremonial culture in which political and social rituals held complex meanings. This chapter reviews significant historical and cultural developments that transformed Europeans’ predominantly oral cultures after 1500. At the time of their explorations in the Americas, the French were familiar with a variety of sign traditions that informed their perception of Indigenous gestures and prepared them well to communicate with signs in the New World. In France, gestural communication was deeply connected to the realms of religious and secular oratory, drama (theatre), and court protocols. The seventeenth century saw a renewal of scientific and philosophical interest for manual eloquence with new universal language schemes being developed, including some of the first manuals of sign language. Increased state control over definitions of civility and ongoing distrust of theatrical gestures as unauthentic resulted in diverging types of nonverbal expression among the elite and the rest of the population. The chapter ends with an overview of early Atlantic repertoires of signs that evolved from the traditions of mariners and soldiers who participated in early voyages.