Sacred Play: Ritual and Humor in South Asian Religions ed. by Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (review)

This volume, edited by Corrine Dempsey and the late Selva Raj, emerged out of a panel for the 2002 national meeting of the American Academy of Religion and offers a refreshing and at times quite entertaining corrective to scholarship that overlooks the playful and light-hearted aspects of religious ritual in favor of more somber pursuits.

Starting from Johan Huizinga’s influential Homo Ludens (1950), the editors’ introduction thoroughly outlines the theoretical foundation for the anthropological and sociological examination of humor. However, Dempsey and Raj argue that until recently these questions have been overlooked by Western scholars of religion, who “view ludic expressions and behaviors as no more than superficial and marginal aspects of human life, incongruent with the seriousness and solemnity normally associated with religious life” (p. 2). As the editors and other contributors to this volume perceive, the varieties of lived religious experience often don’t bear out those assumptions. Their view is that moments of sacred levity can contain a good deal of meaning, and close examination of those moments might offer insight into the means available to people to understand and cope with the circumstances of their lives.

This volume is greatly helped by the open definitions and loose structure the editors have used. In addition to the editors’ introduction and a closing response from Jonathan Z. Smith, Sacred Play is divided into three parts, organized around three common features of religious humor: the challenge of social norms (Part 1, “Laughing Inside Out”), the relationship between humans and the divine (Part 2, “Gods and Humans at Play”), and competition (Part 3, “Playing to Win”). All of these features illuminate important issues of power, belief, and social life, albeit through the use of play and humor, and can be seen in all but the most somber religious contexts.

The authors contributing to this volume offer richly detailed ethnographic analyses of a wide range of South Asian ritual phenomena—from Indian and Nepalese Hindu festivals and Sri Lankan Buddhist practices to Pakistani and North Indian Islamic traditions and localized Christian rituals across the sub-continent. Because each author has a somewhat different definition of and analytical approach to religious levity, Sacred Play offers a productive starting point for researchers in a variety of fields who are examining any sort of ritual phenomena, but especially those traditions outside the Western Christian mainstream from which the western academy seems to have inherited its distaste for laughter (p. 2). The diversity and complexity of South Asian religious traditions, reflected in the breadth of topics covered in these essays, makes this volume a valuable starting point for anyone interested in exploring the lighter side of religious practice, but especially through focuses on gender, the family, social cohesion and hierarchy, divine intimacy and distance, and competition. The authors and editors ask and answer: on what level does the play work for participants? Who is in on the joke and how, and what does that inclusion or exclusion do for existing social ties? Where is the divine, and what is its relationship to believers?

In their introduction, Raj and Dempsey develop a “fun”-ctional—this pun one of several instances where the editors fully commit to their subject with a wink and a smile—typology of six kinds of ritual levity based on the kinds of relationships between participants, both human and divine, and the extent of challenges to the existing hierarchy (p. 9). These types are not mutually exclusive, and every essay in this volume resonates with many of these themes. Raj and Dempsey’s introduction convincingly argues that humor is a human universal, though its forms and meanings are multiple. They go on to demonstrate this point with a collection of essays that takes seriously the ways laughter is grounded in serious social and existential concerns.

Selva Raj’s piece on two...