Abstract
This chapter considers the way in which home might be understood as the constitution of personal rituals: secular and yet sacred, formalized and yet the expression of a creative individuality. It is in the performance of the rituals that home is experienced by the individual. The chapter confronts certain seeming paradoxes: between the secular and the sacred; between the ritualistic and the rational; between the formalized (apparently timeless and impersonal) and the individual-cum-personal. There is a routinality to ritual, but there is something more: an awareness of being present, a reflectivity; ritual represents a significant return. This rituality is able to lend to homeliness the sense of being centered and grounded.
Through the rituals of home, the individual creates a still center to a life that is also experienced as a being-with or transcendence.
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Rapport, N. (2021). Formulas of Home: On the Religious Performance of Personal Rituals. In: Stewart, P.J., Strathern, A.J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76825-6_6
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