One of the attributes of performance is the creation of presence: making present realities, experiences, human and non-human actants vivid enough to move, seduce, deceive, excite, enchant, amuse, terrify, heal, hurt. Ritual practices, the performative genre par excellence of the human condition, privilegedly display this quality. The radiance of presence aims to show diverse poetics of ritual life: how it is integrated by assemblages or collectives; its emphatically embodied and material character; their ways of multiplying ontologies; their ways of re-presenting and making worlds by virtue of images, objects, aisthesis, art, enchantment, material regimes of perception. The book explores and reflects on liminal processes, both of openness and creativity, as well as those of painful forced liminality. It exposes a unique anthropology of experience and notes for an anthropology of perfo...read more