Ritual and Democracy explores the complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a range of contemporary, cultural, and geographic contexts.
This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative 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", funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The seven research-led chapters presented here 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.

Sarah M. Pike is Professor of Comparative Religion and Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. Jone Salomonsen is professor of Theology on the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. Paul-Francois Tremlett is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University.