Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory.

• Author: Gerety, Finnian M.M.
• Position: Book review

Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory. By AXEL MICHAELS. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xix + 372. $41.95 (paper)

Man the player, hierarchical man, man the killer, academic man--Homo Ludens (J. Huizinga, Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1938), Homo Hierarchies (L. Dumont, Paris: Gallimard, 1966), Homo Necans (W. Burkert, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972), Homo Academicus (P. Bourdieu, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984)--to this ever-expanding genre of social scientific works that seek to reveal mankind's singular and essential qualities, we may now add another: Axel Michaels' Homo Ritualis, man the ritualist. Mining the vast body of ritual texts and practices associated with orthodox Hinduism, Michaels in this ambitious book makes two significant contributions: first, he offers an all-encompassing theory of the Hindu path of ritual, showing how the Sanskritic ritual culture of Brahman priests constitutes an influential and enduring paradigm of ritual in Indie religions; second--and more importantly--he brings this paradigm, along with its full suite of indigenous categories and arguments, into conversation with the academic field of ritual studies. This engaging work is the capstone of the many decades Michaels has spent reflecting on ritual and its implications, first as a philologist and ethnographer in the Kathmandu valley, and then as the leader of the Collaborative Research Center "Ritual Dynamics" at the University of Heidelberg, a multi-year initiative that has produced an impressive body of scholarship, much of it in the hybrid mode Michaels dubs "ethno-indology" (pp. 27-31).

Michaels' central argument builds on the conventional wisdom--in this case, more or less correct--that, in Hindu India, "what you believe is less important than what you do" (p. 2). In other words, Hinduism is a domain where identity, status, and piety are negotiated chiefly in the ritual sphere. He also suggests, rightly, that the massive size of the Hindu ritual corpus and the long history of performing and thinking about rites offer a richness and depth rivaled by few other religions. Accordingly, Michaels posits "a Hindu homo ritualis," in the sense of "a certain kind of action habitus" permeating Hindu life (p. 5). Drawing on the work of ritual theorist Roland Grimes (p. 32), he treats Hindu ritual as a special kind of action, a definition that felicitously overlaps with the importance of karma, the 'action' or 'work' of...