Ritual Gone Wrong

The discipline of religious studies has historically tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes that occur in the context of individual performances outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies and scholars have largely dismissed the fact that there are extensive discussions of ritual mistakes in many indigenous traditions'' religious literature. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time and they continue to carry ritual weight even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted how these disruptions can be addressed and when disruptions have gone too far. Using a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid supple and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and in some cases shaping them.