Customer Reviews

Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage

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There are many good things to be said for _Deeply Into the Bone._ As an overview of the rich possibilities that ritual presents for solidifying both abstract meaning and concrete community in our lives, it is excellent. In particular, the specific descriptions of rituals from many cultures illustrate the immense variety that ritual practice takes worldwide. The first-person accounts of ritual experiences, from birth to marriage to more problematic life passages such as abortion and divorce, are extremely well-chosen; I found several of them so affecting that I was moved to tears.

Grimes's book, however, falls short of the promise of its subtitle, "Re-inventing Rites of Passage." The author attacks those who exploit other cultures by borrowing their rituals out of context, but also points out that ritual experimentation can lead to rites that ring emotionally false or seem awkward to the participants. Grimes presents this conundrum without offering any clear advice on how to negotiate it. While he gives a number of examples of innovative rituals that he sees as effective, he fails to explain why these rites are effective while others fall flat; his commentary each time is specific to the ritual described, rarely stepping back to give a larger perspective. Additionally, he muddies the issue by praising ritual groups that seem to violate his rules about taking other cultures' rituals out of context, as when he spends several admiring pages on Paul Hill, the founder of the National Rites of Passage Institute, while never addressing the fact that Hill has evidently conflated the diverse initiation rites of several African cultures into one unified "African-centered" rite.

As an aspiring creator of rituals, I am thankful for the rich context that Grimes provides the question of how Westerners might re-invent ritual. Ultimately, however, the book fails to speak to the question itself. At the end of the book, rather than feeling inspired, I was left frozen between the desire not to take others' rituals out of context and the fear of failing to create effective ritual. Though Grimes ostensibly wrote this book in order to help others imagine their own rituals, his harsh criticisms of the sincere mistakes that seekers make tend to discourage rather than encourage innovation.

In this book, Ronald Grimes attempts to put forth a set of frameworks for approaching ritual in our own lives. The book is exceedingly thought-provoking and very well done. The book is divided into sections describing rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, death, and other passages.

The birth section centers very heavily on Robbie Davis-Floyd's Birth as an American Rite of Passage: Second Edition, both in accepting parts of the thesis and in critiquing others. Additionally pregnancy and childbirth rituals are discussed from around the world.

The coming of age section discusses the theories of Eliade, van Gennep, Turner, and others, and provides numerous examples of practices around the world. This chapter also discusses in far greater detail the problems with transporting practices from one culture to another.

I am less familiar with the major theorists discussed in the other sections to comment there.

Throughout the book Grimes provides theoretical bases for ritual and intermingles these with first-hand accounts of rituals, as well as criticism of the various theoretical bases mentioned. The result is a book which makes you think, invites you to explore the traditions, and look at how we interact with our children in cultivating ritual senses with them. This is a very, very impressive work, though it is not an easy read.

While the book does not offer a real practical approach for re-inventing the rites of passage, this is intentional on the author's part. Moreover, as someone who has been building these rites for a long time, I agree with him that a by-the-numbers approach would surely fail. I would suggest that this book offers a necessary first step, and it is worth reading whether or not one is a beginner in this area, or a more advanced practitioner.

Along with this book, The Singer of Tales has helped me see how much performance is involved in such rituals, and how much they are reinvented in each performance. Grimes never lets us forget that despite long-lived elements to rites of passage, the rites are indeed reinvented frequently. I'd go even further than him and suggest that they are reinvented on each performance.

Highly recommended.