ABSTRACT
Usually, a ritual becomes the object of investigation only when it is perceived to be exotic, bizarre, nonsensical, or absurd. That is to say, when it is someone else’s ritual. The “someone else” has classically been an indigenous person; the investigators, in the main, Protestants. The distorting lens of Protestant-based theories of ritual is addressed in S.J. Tambiah’s book, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. He presents a thorough critique of scholars such as Edmund Tylor and James George Frazer, demonstrating the straitjacket that their theories constructed for analyzing indigenous rituals.
