The Red and the Black: A Practical Experiment for Thinking about Ritual

Abstract

In order to explore ritual action in its own right (“in itself and for itself” as Lévi-Strauss [1971: 598] advises), the author has subjected students and seminar participants to a bare-bones male initiation rite of his own invention: The Red and the Black. He proposes to describe this ritual and, in doing so, to suggest a number of recurrent features of ritual action and, specifically, of (male) initiation rites.

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