[Reader-list] madurai

[Keith Hart]

Soudhamini,

The best discussion of ritual I know is chapter 2 of Roy Rappoport 
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge UP, 1999);

Forms are ideas (Kant) and ideas are pale sensations, according to David 
Hume, therefore not life, as you say. Are all forms representations? 
Probably. Form is the rule and life is variation.

Giambattista Vico, in The New Science, recalled that the Latin word 
memoria originally meant both memory and imagination, since all memory 
was once thought to come from expereince of life. But at th ebeginning 
of the Empire a new class of intellectuals and artists appeared who 
thought they could make things up from scratch and fantasia was born, 
rupturing the link between memory an dlife.

The two great memory banks are language and money (www.thememorybank.co.uk).

Keith