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.
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.
Neville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.
Through the ritual detail of the Common Riding of the Border Towns of Scotland, Dr. Neville explores the emergence of the individual citizen from the corporate medieval world, and the mediating role of the Mother Town in this transition in Western European Protestant culture. Moving between various levels of discourse (an 'ethnological collage'), Dr. Neville alternates beautifully written 'thick description' with clear and penetrating social analysis. The book points
out that the 'town' is a social product of a certain historical, cultural, and economic moment. What I especially like about this book is that it deals with a ritual form from English-speaking Europe. It, thus, serves a mediating role for the dominant American culture that assumes that only Others
have a rich ritual life.
