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  • Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
  • Don Seeman (bio)
Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 248 pp.

This collaborative work gives the lie to the old saw that nothing worthwhile was ever written by a committee. The authors provide a fresh and coherent perspective on the hoary problem of why human beings engage in ritual and how such activities relate to everything else that people do. Ritual is depicted here as a controlled enactment of subjunctivity, like play or theater. As such, ritual seeks to describe not the world (as some social scientists have argued) but a possible world—an "as if," not an "as is." With a broad and surprisingly deft interweaving of scholarship in historiography, the social sciences, philosophy, religious studies, and even architecture, the authors argue that ritual practice and ritual consciousness can be contrasted broadly with the attitude of "sincerity." For reasons related to its own moral coherence, sincerity displaces ritual by refusing to engage in "as if" play. Orthodox Jews and Confucians are said to be ritual virtuosi, while Protestants (and the societies they have built) strive to be sincere. This is too simplistic, because fundamentalist movements in every society are characterized by a sincerity that requires the forceful imposition of ideal models upon a recalcitrant reality. One may quibble with aspects of the argument, but Ritual and Its Consequences is an enormously important and paradigm-changing book. The audacity of its scope is refreshing—a turn to grand theory in an academic culture whose trend is to say more and more about less and less. [End Page 561]

Don Seeman

Don Seeman, associate professor of Jewish ethnography in the department of religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, is the author of One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism.

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