Homo Ritualis

Axel Michaels’ Homo Ritualis indicates something of a mini-renaissance at the intersection of ritual studies and South Asian studies. This rebirth has been facilitated in no small part by the Oxford Ritual Studies series, which, in addition to this book, also recently produced a volume on Vedic fire sacrifice (Homa Variations, edited by Richard K. Payne and Michael Witzel, 2015). In its content and method Homo Ritualis shares much in common with that volume, but it is perhaps more indebted to the spirit of Ronald Grimes, who is mentioned often, and whose The Craft of Ritual Studies (2013), also published in the same series, forms an apt companion. Indeed, despite its subtitle, Michaels's basic project is not “theoretical” in the sense of Mary Douglas, Catherine Bell, or even Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, who also sought to theorize ritual based on South Asian data. Rather than pursuing an overriding theory of ritual, Michaels—like Grimes—seems more intent on divulging a map of the field of ritual studies, to track its terms and delineate its borders. For Michaels, this primary operation also has an empirical edge: to connect that map to the terrain of ritual theory and practice in Hinduism. This is the greatest achievement of Homo Ritualis: to translate the contemporary field of ritual theory into digestibly South Asian terms; to pose adhikāra as “agency”; to place the history of Indology (from Hillebrandt to Houben) opposite textbook figures in the study of religion (from Durkheim to Lawson and McCauley). The book is worth reading simply for this exercise of cross-cultural theorizing.

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