Item Detail
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25666
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0
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0
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English
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Ritual and the Quest for Meaning
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By our Rites of Worship : Latter-day Saint views on ritual in scripture, history, and practice
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Provo, UT; Salt Lake City, UT
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The Religious Studies Center, BYU; Deseret Book Company
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15-36
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Ritual appears in every human society and thus seems to be a central component to the human experience, even a necessary component. Yet the question as to what ritual does—its purpose and meaning—is not necessarily answered. Latter-day Saint anthropologist Walter van Beek, with his extensive interaction with the Dogon people in Mali and the Kapsiki-Higi people in north Cameroon, looks at these questions, establishing criteria along the way by which one can examine different types of ritual activity. Reviewing Latter-day Saint ritual, he then introduces the idea that our rituals are tied to notions of communalism, universal equality, and interaction between the divine and the mortal. Still, he acknowledges, ritual is sometimes silent as to its own meaning, and we are left to interpret the silence from which meaning arises. [Publisher]