Introduction

This volume contains the six contributions prepared for the panel ‘Understanding Ritual’, which met at Coimbra on September 2, 1990, in the framework of the first conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. ‘Understanding Ritual’ was one of four related panels, the other three being ‘Constructing Genders’, ‘Making History’, and ‘Conceptualizing Societies’. These four themes were and are an invitation to discuss the fund of anthropological knowledge in the light of current world trends. That this discussion unfolds in a European framework implies a double comparison: intra-European, of course, but also between anthropological ways of thought in Europe and in the rest of the world, particularly in the United States.