What the hell, where is the materialist analysis? How can you talk about rituals without considering the differential roles people are forced into depending on their class, gender, race, sexuality, and so on? This is the most generalised, non-intersectional take of ritual and play I've read. Sure, it's good to develop a general framework to understand social dramas, but fucking hell, it's like every subject mentioned is just a blank body (over here, over there, but otherwise, nowhere). There's even one part near the end where the Olympic Games are called humanistic. Yeah sure, a great fucking ritual that's displaced poor communities and laden numerous countries with debt; a Hellinistic spectacle that's run by Coca-Cola, McDonald's, petrochemical and car manufacturers, and banks with investments in military technologies.

Fuck, I hate this apolitical liberalism that doesn't take a stand on anything and yet nevertheless presents itself as something progressive. Yes the body matters in ritual, but that ritual takes place in a greater political space, and if that political space isn't analysed, then all knowledge generated is merely indicative. It's just another referent in a system of positive phenomena. The point of critical thinking is to move beyond this. It is to take a fucking stand on the societies and cultures we are analysing, so that they may be transformed. Without transformation, knowledge is dead weight, inconsequential tidbits of data that fascinate, and in fascinating, steal the life out of us, bit by bit, until all we see is exactly all there is. A changeless eternity of dispossession. Headless rampant capital, patriarchy and white supremacy.