Publishers Enterprises Group (PEG) Ltd recently published the book The Ritual Year, the proceedings of the First Ritual Year International Conference on ethnology and folklore.

This publication brings together the writings of over 40 ritual specialists, including folklorists, ethnologists, musicologists, archaeologists, social anthropologists, historians, and scholars involved in rituals – a new area of study.

Edited by George Mifsud Chircop, this scientific anthology is the fruit of the First Ritual Year International Conference on ethnology and folklore held in Malta in 2005 by the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year.

The volume is divided into two: ‘Rituals in Malta’ and ‘Rituals in Europe and Beyond’. One finds various issues, styles and degrees of religiosity, genres of ritual practice, as well as fluidity, vitality and rationality. Local perspectives and complexities, reflecting the time and place in which they have come into existence, become inextricably locked within their cultural particularity and immediate world, and/or adapt themselves to the needs, self-expression, ideals, and innovations of the community/ies in question.

Five explanatory frameworks for Ritual appear to emerge – descriptive or archival studies, including musicology; the religious significance of Ritual, or on the socially effective power of the ‘sacred’; rituals in terms of the internal logic of their symbols and myths; relation of Ritual to ‘political economy’, broadly conceived; and the relation of Ritual to social structure and changes in structure, including those which focus on seasonal economical cycles, and those which analyse Ritual in terms of gender difference. Many of the papers in the last group explore what was clearly a key theme of the Conference – the conceptualisation of the Ritual Year.

The Ritual Year can be purchased from all leading bookshops. For more information telephone PEG on 2144-0083 or 2144-8539 or visit the PEG Publications homepage www.peg.com.mt