This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, ‘Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’ (REDO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The chapters document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.

This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London in 2015, organized as part of the international research project, ‘Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’ (REDO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The chapters document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.

The 2013 Gezi Park protests and the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey were watershed moments in recent struggles over Turkish democracy. Both made use of and gave rise to performative repertoires that unmistakably revealed the existence of competing conceptions of democracy in Turkey. This chapter explores the manner in which two of these repertoires – the yeryüzü iftarları (earth iftars) and demokrasi nöbeti (democracy vigil) – performatively disclose two distinct and indeed, irreconcilable, variations on democracy. In exploring these two repertoires, the chapter suggests that the earth iftars, which draw on a ‘religious’, ‘Muslim’ ritual, offer a more radically open, inclusive and indeed ‘democratic’ articulation of democracy than the ‘secular’, ‘nationalist’ vigil avowedly staged in defence of democracy. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of Jacques Derrida’s articulation of democracy and deconstruction, suggesting that the deconstructive framework and Derrida’s conception of democracy-to-come offer a way of grasping what might, at first glance, seem like a counterintuitive argument – namely, that the performance of a ‘religious’ ritual has greater democratic potential than a ‘secular’ performance explicitly staged in defense of democracy.

This chapter concerns a specific moment of political protest that took place in London in 2014, organised by a group called Occupy Democracy. The protest was marked by the iconoclastic destruction of protest material culture by ‘Heritage Wardens’ and Police. My interest is in the political agency of protest things. In order to understand how these things might – at least at certain sites and on certain occasions – possess political agency, I turn substantially to Emile Durkheim’s theory of totemism and then to Jane Bennett’s vitalist conception of the assemblage.

This chapter discusses how free speech emerged after the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo. It provides a new interpretation of free speech as a material event, which is irreducible to liberal understandings of free speech as a critical or harmful act. The chapter begins by drawing upon theories of ritual enactments and political subjectivity, so as to better identify the creative political dimensions of protest movements. This offers a basis for witnessing how free speech materialized in the Paris ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement and the Srinagar protests against Charlie Hebdo. The emergence of slogans and objects in demonstrations indicated the transformation of free speech into an object that can be defended or destroyed. In turn, the material crafting of free speech into physical objects, such as banners and effigies, reveal free speech as a clash between iconographic and iconoclastic practices. This chapter develops our understanding free speech’s materialization in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings.

This essay proposes an expanded methodology for studying pilgrimage that aims to integrate aspects that go beyond the anthropocentric study of the phenomenon. By paying attention to ecological history, the effects of climate, landscape, water and weather on pilgrim and pilgrimage, and inspired by the work of Eduardo Kohn, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, the essay envisions pilgrimage as a complex interspecies relationship. The practice of climate pilgrimage provides an example of an embodied ritual that goes beyond the anthropocentric by gathering and carrying water from all across Norway to the UN Climate negotiations in Paris.

The article communicates the findings from fieldwork carried out 2014-17 in the Apostles’ Church, a congregation in the center of Copenhagen belonging to the Church in Denmark. The congregation attracts migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran whose application for asylum the authorities often reject. Conversion from Islam to Christianity represents a typical response to this impasse. The fieldwork sheds light on the way that the presence of migrants affects the Eucharist, the ritual around which the service revolves. The form of the ritual is changed and its traditional, theological, Lutheran interpretation is disrupted. Once a sacrament in which the forgiving of sins was assigned the individual believer, the Eucharist has now become a ritual in which a new and complex identity of the individual participant as well as the community is established: without losing their ethnic identity, participants are incorporated into the communal body of Christ. The article demonstrates how this new identity is able to hold social and ethnic tensions in check. The findings are illuminated by ritual theory and demonstrates how Bell’s and Staal’s focus on, respectively, ritual difference and rules and repetition is able to explain how renewal can take place within an established, conservative practice. The presence of experiences that new participants bring to the ritual makes a difference.

Based on participatory fieldwork undertaken mostly in France, this article explores the political dimensions of collective dance practices pursued in the spirit of self-discovery and personal transformation (5 Rhythms, Movement Medicine, Biodanza, etc.). These activities are not instances of political activism in and of themselves, nor are they organized according to democratic principles. However, they call into play moral and social values that are consonant with the principles that democratically inspired political actions seek to put into effect. In this respect, they are not reducible to the consumption of a resource for individual self-fulfilment. We argue that like many other contemporary “alternative” or “spiritual” initiatives, these activities involve participants in extra-ordinary yet lived-through situations that enact a special mode of sociability, many aspects of which are immediately relevant to the functioning of social movements based on participatory democratic principles. By affording participants with ritual experiences in which individual autonomy and collective solidarity are made interdependent, these practices can be a resource for democratic commitment in the political sphere.

Indigenous cultural festivals attract international performers and audiences. They include events as diverse as First Nation reserve powwows, the annual Riddu Riđđu festival organised by Sámi in arctic Norway, and the biennial Origins Festival in London. These events illustrate a cultural range by including diverse genres of music, dance, film, theatre, costume, workshops and youth camps. This chapter considers the varied ways in which such festivals extend democratic possibilities for participants and their communities. Such possibilities begin with the recovery of cultural pride even while at the margins of dominant (dominating) societies. They include opportunities to debate issues confronting many Indigenous people(s). Over against the perception that Indigeneity is definitively about shared experiences of marginalisation and colonisation, festivals push the notion of place as larger-than-human or multi-species community. The chapter will illustrate this with a Mi’kmaq celebration of the flight of an eagle, a Maori greeting to mountains, a Sámi expression of concern for fish, and a Maluyligal dance for/as ancestors. The chapter will argue that trans-Indigenous approaches to democracy may be seen in efforts to increase human inclusivity and in the inclusion of other-than-human persons. Within this, it is the pervasive Indigenous understanding of emplacement most radically confronts cultural assumptions that place is mere scenery or a resource for exploitation.

This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative edited volume contains seven original, research-led chapters that explore complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a wide range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. The volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, ‘Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’ (REDO) funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The chapters document entanglements of the religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual and politics and identity in performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces and as catalysts for change.