Download or read book Understanding Rituals written by Daniel de Coppet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Rituals explores how ritual can be understood within the framework of contemporary social anthropology, and shows that ritual is now one of the most fertile fields of anthropological research. The contributors demonstrate how rituals create and maintain - or transform - a society's cultural identity and social relations. By examining specific rituals from various theoretical viewpoints, they reveal the ultimate and contradictory values to which each society as a whole is attached.