Ritual and Violence

In the late 1980s, religiously motivated rituals in Europe were considered a species threatened by extinction. Archaic relics of only folkloristic or entertainment interests which would no longer have any meaning in a globalized and secularized world. Twenty years later, the situation has changed fundamentally.

Old rituals live on and new ones are being invented and forcing their way into European societies from all over the world. Excesses of violence which seem to enter Western societies from the outside often have their origin in rituals and generate resonances and counterparts in Europe.

Given this background, Thomas Hauschild develops a new view on rituals and on their connection to resentment and violence. He understands rituals - beyond idealizing and demonizing, beyond the »enlightened West« and the »Backward East«, or post-colonial thought and scientific belief - as essentially politically-neutral border phenomena which occur at the edges of textually passed-down knowledge, which have almost nothing to do with abstract political-religious convictions of people than with their concrete living conditions. Thus Hauschild emphasizes the microanalysis of local ritual practices and presents very vivid ethnological studies of European societies and the Mediterranean region.

Hauschild examines the »culture« of Al Qaida as well as the Sicilian Mafia, »honor killing«, the »evil eye« and other magical and religious rituals and fetishes. Hereby rituals prove to be valuable cultural assets which are not per se a breeding ground for fundamentalism and sectarianism but something from which either violent or peaceful consequences can be drawn - just like with any other cultural form.