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This introductory chapter first sets out the book's main goal, which is to show that the concept of common knowledge has broad explanatory power; that common knowledge generation is an essential part of what public ritual “does”; and that the classic dichotomy between rationality and culture should be questioned. It then discusses coordination problems and offers some examples to illustrate how common knowledge is a useful everyday concept, part of the common sense meaning of “public,” and how common knowledge can to some degree be distinguished from “content” or “meaning.” The final section describes other contexts in which the concepts in the present study have been examined.

This chapter situates John Bull at the Hustings, and examines electoral politics from the Ancien Regime to the Second Reform Act. The first section describes the theatre of the hustings, looking at the public rituals and the role of the crowd. The second section looks closely at the methods of electioneering before the Reform Act of 1832. The election of 1831 intensified the politics of opinion, and gave a sharper national dimension to the division between opponents and supporters of political and constitutional change. The third section notes the impact of reform, though many rituals remained part of a political culture in which politicians had to woo voters through both words and deeds. The fourth section documents the rise of the platform with the developments in mass communications, print, and transport.

This chapter examines the ways in which Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) emerged into open conflict with the Spanish state at the end of that decade. It argues that nationalist movements are constructed in part through public performance and spectacle, and that a striking feature of nationalist public performance was the way in which it mirrored the gendered performances and discourse of the Franco state. The interviews with women active in Basque nationalist politics in the 1960s highlight the contrast between the public rituals of Francoism and the opposing political culture of family and local community.

Chapter 4 is about the process of being and becoming Pentecostal and the specific ways in which converts negotiate evangelical identity on the ground, distinguishing themselves as Christians apart. This chapter explores the folk construction of “cristiano” as a public category of personhood and considers the practical strategies Pentecostals use to claim orthodox or “true” Christian status. The author advances the argument that the core of Dominican Pentecostalism in urban barrios is the performance of piety and not personal conviction or belief, per se. Converts ultimately constitute themselves as exceptional Christians through public rituals of personal affirmation: namely, the interrelated conventions of conversion (and adult baptism), testimony, and the observance of behavioral prohibitions, practices that together articulate key evangelical themes of transformation and discontinuity. This chapter theorizes Pentecostal ritual practice as projects of identity formation that precede conviction and make belief possible, but not necessary.

This is a summary of various aspects discussed in the book. Focusing on different contemporary manifestations of local and localized Islam, this section offers insights into the future of various Muslim public rituals.

This chapter discusses Southern women's roles in Civil War commemorations. The Cities of the Dead created by women provided a means for rebel resistance to continue in a form of guerrilla warfare through mourning, without threatening the broader contours of male–female relations. Southern white women determined the content of ceremonies, mobilized men to collect and rebury the dead, and raised funds for all of these concerns. Their efforts earned them the recognition of many southerners as providing the occasions that kept the Confederate past alive. By performing their job as caretakers of men, alive or dead, Southern women also helped fashion public rituals that sorted out new ideas about men and women.

This chapter shows that cowboys performed public rituals that displayed their masculinity through drinking, gambling, and fighting. But as more settlers moved into the region and as the cattlemen built houses in town for their families, the towns developed other economic interests as well as social values. They began with moral legislation, the so-called blue laws, but also gave regular lectures to the cowboys in the newspapers about proper behavior. When these lectures did not work, they tried to ridicule the cowboys in a variety of ways, suggesting that their unrestrained behavior was less than manly. As the cowboys became marginal to the lives of the town, they became subjects of humor and were relegated to the status of oddity or criminal. The cowboy thus became a pariah in the cow towns he had helped build.

Executionary publicity was not universally contested. Many people were still attached to the show of political force embodied by public executions, as well as the opportunity to morally “test” oneself. Faced with the advocates of this form of “brutalization,” the chapter examines the arguments that backed the preservation of public rituals of execution. It includes discussions about the demand for exemplarity and attempts to delegitimize the regime in its attempts to reform the Criminal Code; the plan to restore the use of corporal punishment and the whip as a deterrent to crime; the people's thirst for the guillotine in the wake of the Soleilland affair paradoxically led to a major victory for the pro-death-penalty camp; compartmentalization of the civilizing process and insensitivity to suffering of the general populace; the executions, brutalization and glorification of the violence of war; the diffusion of military values in service of executions being conditioned by “trivialization”; a martial relationship to executions, executions that attracted spectators; lastly the transforming of an execution into a good death “by self-punishment” and a “good death” by convincing the public that punishment was administered by an autonomous individual to himself rather than by the law.

Chapter 3, presented by Brent K. S. Woodfill and Marc Wolf, introduces Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, a site located at the highland-lowland nexus in western Guatemala, best known as being the largest of the ancient Maya saltworks in the southern lowlands. The site’s natural and constructed monumental landscape defined not only the city’s layout but also its economy and political structure. The most obvious of the saltworks were the brine stream and salt flats, but the salt industry changed the landscape in other ways—it was fueled by fires that needed a constant supply of firewood and allowed for the large-scale production of other commodities including dried, salted fish, which were harvested in large quantities from the Chixoy River and associated streams and oxbow lakes. All of these resources appear to have been tightly controlled by the local elite, who marked their presence with large administrative and public ritual structures.