Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. Rite Out of Place collects 10 revised essays originally published in widely varied sources across the past five years. Grimes has selected for inclusion those essays that track ritual as it haunts the edges of cultural boundaries-ritual converging with theater, ritual on television, ritual at the edge of natural environments and so on. The writing is non-technical, and the implied audience is sufficiently broad than any educated person interested in religion and public life should find it intelligible and engaging.

This wide-ranging volume by Ronald Grimes, a distinguished interpreter of ritual, includes eleven artful and provocative reflections on rites performed outside specifically religious spaces-in popular culture, academic settings, and the natural landscape. Rite Out of Place will be useful for all those who want to think more deeply, and creatively, about the meaning and function of performance. * Thomas A. Tweed, author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion *

Ronald L. Grimes holds the Chair of Ritual Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Deeply into the Bone, Readings in Ritual Studies, and several other books on ritual. Grimes is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.