Rituals
–noun
3. observance of set forms in public worship.
5. a book containing the offices to be used by priests in administering the sacraments and for visitation of the sick, burial of the dead, etc.
7. prescribed, established, or ceremonial acts or features collectively, as in religious services.
8. any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner.
9. a prescribed code of behavior regulating social conduct, as that exemplified by the raising of one's hat or the shaking of hands in greeting.
10. Psychiatry . a specific act, as hand-washing, performed repetitively to a pathological degree, occurring as a common symptom of obsessive-compulsive neurosis.
–adjective
Rituals are most commonly performed for their symbolic value. Most rituals are based off of traditions within and family or culture. Rituals may be and are often performed on specific occasions. Most commonly referred to rituals are associated with religion, spiritual, or social. I am most interested in the ritual of space and performances.
This semester I am photographing women in the environment that reflects them in some way. I am taking pictures of women with a dollhouse in the background representing the ritual that these women used to be engaged and would role-play with the characters in the dollhouse.
Articles
Quotes
“Manipulation of the dolls within selective, gendered architectural spaces allowed the dollhouse owners to visualize the ideal Dutch home and "perform" their appropriate role within it as productive, disciplined, and orderly wives, mothers, and domestic managers.”
--- Michelle Moseley-Christian
“The use of toys in the seventeenth-century Netherlands as didactic tools to enforce moral and social order for children is well established, and has been linked to textual sources such as emblem books and household manuals (Durantini 1983: 178-99). Other examples of toys in didactic and ritual contexts throughout medieval and early modern Europe, and the location of these objects within an adult, female domestic sphere, suggest that these dollhouses, modeled after toys on a lavish scale, may have fulfilled a similar admonitory function. It is the location of these role-playing objects within an adult, female domestic sphere that suggests the instructive function of toys was adapted to a wider audience, including women.”—Michelle Moseley- Christian
“There are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special gestures and words, recitation of fixed texts, performance of special music, songs or dances, processions, manipulation of certain objects, use of special dresses, consumption of special food, drink, or drugs, and much more.”—wikipedia rituals
Annotated bib
Moseley-Christian, Michelle. Seventeenth- Century Pronk Poppenhuisen: Domestic Space and the Ritual Function of Dutch Dollhouses for Women. Home Cultures; Nov. 2010
This article is a study that investigates the nature of surviving dollhouses of the Seventeenth- Century Pronk Poppenhuisen that are agreed to be the ideal domestic identity for Dutch mothers and wives from the Netherlands. The dollhouses that this article specifically studies were owned and collected by rich women collectors.
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