Editorial: for Don Handelman on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Introduction: Although we intuitively ‘know’ that play and ritual sometimes constitute one another—and that the boundary between them is so thin that at times it simply evaporates—we, nonetheless, continue to attribute the kinds of transformations that rituals enable mainly to the domain of the sacred and the kinds of transformations enacted through play to the mundane (to paraphrase Durkheim’s now obsolete term ‘profane’). In that sense, we artificially distinguish between social triviality and phenomenality as two predetermined modes of action and perception.