Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason. Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. This wide-ranging volume by Ronald Grimes, a distinguished interpreter of ritual, includes eleven artful and provocative reflections on rites performed outside specifically religious spaces-in popular culture, academic settings, and the natural landscape. Rite Out of Place will be useful for all those who want to think more deeply, and creatively, about the meaning and function of performance.