Ritual and the enemy body: a new approach to modern atrocity
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Date
2025
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Citation
Frankfurter D. Ritual and the Enemy Body: A New Approach to Modern Atrocity. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2025:1-26. doi:10.1017/S0010417525000076
Abstract
The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.