Ritual, Ritualization and Religious Popular Culture: Thinking over some Religious Visual Representation and New Methods of Maddahi

Such useful concepts as "ritual" and "popular culture"have been used by various approaches to clarify mechanisms through which religion, culture and society work. Consisting of two main parts, this article attempts to elucidate the sense in which we can talk about "religious popular culture" in the context of Iranian shi'i culture and society governed by an Islamic state. The first part presents a brief theoretical overview of the rich literature on these concepts. The following part consists of an ethnographic study of Ashura rituals and iconography. My ethnographic data comes out of my observations in 1984(2005). From a symbolic- culturalist approach, this part is aimed at explaining the interaction between Ashura rituals and iconography and popular culture in recent Iran.In spired by a de Certeauian view of popular culture, the second part discusses Ashura rituals as means modified and used by people as tactics against dominant strategies manifested in the form of current ritualization or the ongoing Islamization.