“Connected to the past”

Abstract

Contemporary rituals at archaeological sites display competing interpretations of the past, future, and related religious, identitary and political claims—as found in research on contemporary Paganisms. This paper examines such rituality and tradition-building among the Rainbow Family. The article compares the Rainbow case to research on Paganisms, after describing what kind of ritual expressions related to archaeological sites are found in a Rainbow Gathering and how the expressions relate to each other in the frame of the collective culture. The article provides an example of crafted rituals and folkloric narratives in an ‘event-cultural’ community that recognizes the right for subjective signification. It explains how narratives and practices, while not completely convergent, can still relate to each other in the collective frame without being a threat to social cohesion or cultural coherence. In the Rainbow case, a demand for shared beliefs is replaced with participation in the shared practices, and a broad ideological division accommodating various alternative-holistic religious traditions.