<p><em>Ritual and Democracy</em>&nbsp;explores the complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a range of contemporary, cultural, and geographic contexts.</p><p>This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the inter&shy;national research project, &ldquo;Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource&rdquo;,&nbsp; funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. The seven research-led chapters presented here document entanglements of the&nbsp;religious and the secular in political assembly and iconoclastic protest, of affect and belonging in pilgrimage and church ritual, and politics and identity in&nbsp;performances of self and culture. Across the essays emerges a conception&nbsp;of ritual less as scripts for generating stability than as improvisational spaces&nbsp;and as catalysts for change.</p>