This paper considers the connections between religion, ritual and politics in the works of Clifford Geertz and Maurice Bloch and confronts their approaches with some examples of ritual from Nepal. lt is suggested that both writers have great strengths, often not those conventionally ascribed to them, but both attempts to put forward a theory of ritual are undermined by the assumption that ritual is just one kind of thing in all the contexts in which it appears. The Nepalese examples are set out in line with a schematic typology, which, it is suggested, provides a possible basis for a historically grounded and generalising approach to the anthropological study of ritual.