Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the `Common Riding' is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of `the town' in Western culture. Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.
| ISBN: | 9780195088373 |
| Publication date: | 21st July 1994 |
| Author: | Gwen Kennedy (Elizabeth Root Paden Professor of Sociology, Elizabeth Root Paden Professor of Sociology, Southwestern U Neville |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 166 pages |
| Genres: |
Anthropology Sociology Social and cultural anthropology |