A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual.

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution.
 
Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.
 

"“The white Protestants who shaped US middle-class culture in the early nineteenth century saw themselves as enlightened reformers. . . . [but] Logan shows these people could also be confused, ambivalent, embarrassed characters, half-alienated from the very social roles they assigned to themselves, uncomfortable in the costumes they put on and the gestures they performed. Despite their fantasies of rapture, much of their experience was boring. They went through the motions dissociating and cringing. Logan is a smart, skilled analyst of [their] awkwardness.”" - American Religion

"“A book that says, in a lively and stylish way, that many of the things we think we know about ritual are wrong. Logan argues that there is no ritualized body or regime of ritual discipline. Nor does ritual resemble practice or disciplined action, as others have theorized those concepts. Instead, Logan offers a new frame: ritual is awkward. It is more like theater, especially when the acting is bad. . . . Awkward Rituals is a useful and challenging book for the study of religion broadly construed.”" - Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

"Awkward Rituals challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about rituals as sincere, productive, and cohesive. . . . For those of us concerned with objects, bodies, spaces, and sensations, this book is an example of how we can generatively engage with the ambiguity and contradictions of the material world." - Material Religion

"A helpful reminder that rituals did not resolve all contradictions, all tensions in expressions of solidarity or sympathy—and did not necessarily feel normal or comfortable." - Journal of the Early Republic