Elements of Ritual and Violence by Margo Kitts (review)

Ever since the 9/11 attacks the fraught interconnection between religion and violence has been a growing topic of interest within the humanities and social sciences. The Cambridge Elements series, similar to the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series, offers readers a concise overview to a wide variety of subjects, and, particularly for this text, the ways in which ritual and violence intersect. Ritual studies—theory, practice, conflict, politics, power, meaning and place-making—have been extensively examined elsewhere. What makes Elements of Ritual and Violence unique is the way in which Margo Kitts problematizes and links the somatic and iconic aspects of ritual and violence through the framework of what she calls "rituals of menace," a useful heuristic device for understanding the efficacy of the terror evoked within contemporary ISIS beheading videos and other staged displays.

The text is divided into three sections—violence, ritual, and rituals of menace. Preceding these is a short introductory section wherein Kitts considers the range of possible meanings for both rituals and violence, which are inherently elusive, yet as Kitts points out, have a long history in religious practice in both texts and social action from the earliest civilizations. In section one, Kitts closely examines theories and perspectives of violence and violent death from a philosophical and anthropological perspective, including archaeological—specifically the phenomenology of pain and sacred pain, bodily mutilation and scarification (trauma as part and parcel of social and individual transformation), rites of terror, violent simulations in games, horror films and dystopic novels, trauma art, war photography, and the iconography of religious suffering. For Kitts, these types of violent exhibitions are a form of performance that is "polyvocal" and that have a "powerful impact on the imagination" (11). Although the antiquity of human violence is evident within the archaeological record through cannibalism, warfare, and Upper Paleolithic rock art, its broader cultural meanings and significance are, as Kitts suggests, debatable.

Section two introduces the reader to ritual theory, specifically that of Frazer, Turner, Geertz, Tambiah, Robertson-Smith, Fernandez, Levi-Strauss, and others in an effort to "ponder ritual's potential relationship with violence" (37). Central to Kitts' approach to ritual is the experience of the ritual participants themselves, or its "ideation"—the full range of ritual experience, including performance, its malleability, ideas, awareness, historicity, individual and collective transformation, and imagery. Kitts offers many fascinating examples from political rituals and public self-torture in Buddhism, to assault sorcery in Guyana, South America. Ritual in this context, as Kitts observes, can be utilized as "a vehicle for conjuring a violent imaginary" as an act of cultural expression that employs not only a cosmology of threat, able to destabilize asymmetrical power relations, but also can "enhance menace through ritualization" (50–51). This ability for ritual to foment a violent imaginary is deeply connected to its intended menace, which Kitts argues can only be conceptualized by understanding ritual's underlying rhythms, formalization, and seductive/somatic dramaturgical qualities.

Section three—rituals of menace—"as in cursing and threatening rituals," combine the author's interests in ritual and violence (84). Here Kitts argues through an examination of ancient oath-making spectacles and ISIS beheading videos that rituals of menace are "intended to evoke a strong visceral response," and are meant to be "grasped both somatically and iconically" in order for its terror to do its work upon the viewer (85).

Elements of Ritual and Violence succeeds in serving as a deeply informative and thought-provoking primer and handbook to the study of ritual and violence, a topic that is difficult to define and teach, but that is becoming ever more important to understand.