Description: How do rituals achieve their effects? Matt Tomlinson approaches this classic question from a new angle, arguing that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns. He presents vivid examples from Fiji, ranging from a Pentecostal "crusade" to missionary reports of "happy deaths."
Review Quotes: "The product of long experience with Fijian life, closely observed, this volume brings together an impressively diverse range of phenomena. With clear and direct prose, Tomlinson sorts through the complexities of religion and politics to offer us a compelling and original theory of ritual." --Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
"In Ritual Textuality, Matt Tomlinson presents a provocative study of varieties of ritual performance in contemporary Fiji, one that resonates with seminal anthropological works that have explored how ritual patterns establish and reproduce religious authority... His insightful analysis reveals a method of locating language ideology in several contexts, and demonstrates for the Fijian case how ritual performance articulates with structures of power." --Pacific Affairs