Born in New York City, Bell undertook her undergraduate studies at Manhattanville College, gaining a double-major BA in philosophy and religion in 1975.

[1] Covering the costs for her international research, she obtained award fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[1] Bell served as chair of the department from 2000 to 2005, then stepping down to become professor emeritus; she took early retirement due to an inability to cope following her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 2000.

[1][5] In 2005, the University of Chicago Divinity School named her "Alumna of the Year", on their website praising her as "a great scholar and teacher... [and] a skilled administrator".

[2][1] She began work on a new project, Believing: Assuming Universality, Describing Particularity in the Study of Religion, funded by another fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but it was left unfinished at the time of her death.

[1] The chair of the Santa Clara religious studies department, Paul Crowley, described her as "a magnificent colleague, a scholar of international standing, [and] an inspiring mentor to generations of students".

[1] Historian of religion Reza Aslan asserted that she would be remembered for generations to come due to her "rigorous scholarship", and that she was "unmatched" as an academic.

[7] Having known Bell personally, Jonte-Pace thought that the book exhibited her "fearless intellectual style" and "sense of freedom" from past frameworks.

[3] Public intellectual Reza Aslan claimed that it "launched a revolution" in the way that scholars understood the subject, becoming "required reading" for students of religious studies.

(19) Bell integrates the ideas and theories of Edward Shils, Durkheim, Stanley Tambiah, Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins and Claude Levi-Strauss all pertaining to ritual studies.

(20) Ritual symbolism plays a role in the natural struggle of humans with their moral self and external “socio-political” order and constraints of the world.

Bell reestablishes the different dichotomies that are at play against one another: continuity and change, individual experience and social forms, beliefs and behaviors, and thought and action.

(43–44) Drama insinuates the individual participating in the ritual is like an actor; they are simply doing the actions and saying things, while their internal thoughts are irrelevant.

(94) Bell discusses the ideas of Durkheim, Mauss, and Hertz on the body, arguing that bodily expressions are social in nature and acquired in practice.

(94) In contrast to this perception, Bell includes Lakoff’s argument that these basic categories are inherent and rooted in the sociobiological body.

(100) Many rituals take part in certain performances that are mandated by the authority of history, such as Muslims sacrificing animals on the day of Eid Al-Adha.

(101) Bell describes a hierarchical system created via linguistic or physical means and organized by the creation of oppositions through ritualization.

(106) However, this interaction of body and environment, or ritualization, simply shifts the nature of social problems to endless circular schemes, where no resolution is produced, only implied.

(113) She closes this section stating, “That is to say within the medium of formally explicit discourse, there is nothing there to grasp, just a variety of culturally instinctive and flexible schemes with which to avoid and undermine everything but the ritual acts themselves.” (114) Since there is a difference between thought and action in ritual the same idea applies for what theoretical practice sees and does not see itself doing (the object-unity of theoretical discourse).

(115) Shared culture may strategically transform the way one group practices from another in terms of the simple alterations of actions in ritual, which are then deployed around the area.

Although Bell describes two views, she discusses ideology implemented within a society as a way for the dominant class to maintain power and control.

(190) She concludes that in this way, ideology is a unifying form of power which creates a greater distribution of control than relationships that exist with the use of pure force.

Any moderately socialized person may use ritualization, both in its cultural and situational forms, as a strategy by distinguishing or blurring the boundary that makes an activity a “specific way of acting”.

The first dimension is the dynamics of the social body and its projection of a structured environment, where ritualization produces and objectifies the constructions of power.

"The person who has prayed to his or her god, appropriating the social schemes of the hegemonic order in terms of an individual redemption, may be stronger because these acts are the very definitions of power, personhood, and the ability to act.” (217–8) Bell's second major work was published in 1997.