Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity
Quotes and highlights from Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity by Roy A. Rappaport — 2 passages I marked up while reading (April 2021). Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
What this book keeps circling back toworlds and language.
All 2 highlights
That language permits thought and communication to escape from the solid actualities of here and now to discover other realms, for instance, those of the possible, the plausible, the desirable, and the valuable, has already been emphasized. This was not quite correct. Language does not merely permit such thought but both requires it and makes it inevitable.
With language the world comes to be furnished with qualities like good and evil, abstractions like democracy and communism, values like honor, valor and generosity, imaginary beings like demons, spirits and gods, imagined places like heaven and hell. All of these concepts are reified, made into res, real "things," by social actions contingent upon language. Human worlds are, therefore, inconceivably richer than the worlds inhabited by other creatures.
What I've written around this
Where these ideas turn up in my own work.
- On RhetoricRhetoric is the medium of purpose. It surrounds us at all times, and we cannot live without it.
- What Do You Really Want?It is surprisingly difficult to tell people what you really want. Why?
- On Costs, Words, and the Digital Age
Read alongside
Other books on the shelf that cover similar ground.
I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.