ABSTRACT
The interest in ritual action has made ritual study much more interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on anthropological field work and ethnographic labour. The interest in bodies and action has also drawn ritual studies alongside disciplines like cognitive studies and performance studies, effectively reversing Durkheim's premise that ritual serves beliefs. Ritual, similarly, manipulates perception, reducing, organising, and channeling reality into specific perceptual phenomena. The participant in a ritual confronts a field of objects selected out of reality, arranged and modulated. The way in which perception and ritual participation construct and reconstruct the identity of an individual can have a radically ontological result, such as what anthropologist Jon P. Mitchell has characterised as a 'transformation of the existential grounds of selfhood'. Ritual's capacity to transmit and transform can be seen in the temple rituals of the mid-nineteenth-century Mormon community, based in Nauvoo, Illinois. The ritual initiate becomes, then, the living transmission of that collective identity, that culture, to the next generation.
