Relational Rituals and Communication

Ritual Interaction in Groups

D. Kádár

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230393059
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

This book provides a ground-breaking, interaction-based framework of rituals, drawing on multiple research disciplines. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through pre-existing patterns and captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing interactants' behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts.

1

Introduction

1.1 Why this book?

This book offers a discursive relational framework of rituals. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through preexisting patterns (cf. Chapter 2), and it captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing the interactants’ behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts, hence avoiding a priori predictions (cf. later in the present section; for a detailed introduction to discursive approaches see Haugh et al. 2013). Stereotypically, English and other Western languages are thought of as languages which have dispensed with rituals, and the present volume will be challenging this concept.

Traditionally, the notion of ritual includes a variety of acts, spanning from baptism prayers, through certain acts of etiquette, to utterances such as Well done to acknowledge someone’s achievements. Whilst interpretations of ‘ritual’ vary greatly, in popular culture this notion often refers to a prescribed, archaic form of behaviour, as represented by the following extract from the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Musgrave Ritual’:¹

(1.1)

“‘It is rather an absurd business, this ritual of ours,’ he answered. ‘But it has at least the saving grace of antiquity to excuse it. I have a copy of the questions and answers here if you care to run your eye over them.’

“He handed me the very paper which I have here, Watson, and this is the strange catechism to which each Musgrave had to submit when he came to man’s estate. I will read you the questions and answers as they stand.

“‘Whose was it?’

“‘His who is gone.’

“‘Who shall have it?’

“‘He who will come.’

“‘Where was the sun?’

“‘Over the oak.’

“‘Where was the shadow?’

“‘Under the elm.’

“‘How was it stepped?’

“‘North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.’

“‘What shall we give for it?’

“‘All that is ours.’

“‘Whyshouldwegiveit?’

“‘For the sake of the trust.’

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Musgrave Ritual [1893] 2003)

This ritual – meant to be performed when a member of the Musgrave family “came to man’s estate” – is a rather archetypal one, due to its solemn nature.

Although such acts certainly represent an important aspect of rituality, from a discursive perspective – which implies focusing on ritual acts as they occur in interaction – ritual covers a much broader set of phenomena. Indeed, ritual can be an interactionally ‘stand-alone’ or ‘demarcated’ (cf. Staal 1979, and Chapter 5) act like the Musgrave ritual, which is clearly codified and institutionalised, and which is meant to be performed at a definite point in time. However, to discourse pragmaticians it is evident that rituals are present in daily conversations, often in interactionally “co-constructed” forms (cf. Schegloff 1995).

Furthermore, from a relational perspective – i.e. if we examine the effect of language on human identities “being in relation” with each other (see Miller 1984) – ritual plays a significantly more important relational role than marking ceremonies: by means of ritual acts we work out and maintain interpersonal relationships in diverse ways. In pragmatics, the technical terms ‘relational’ and ‘relating’ are applied in different contexts (cf. Chapter 2), and here they simply describe the interactional construction (or destruction) of interpersonal relationships vis-à-vis ritual practices.² This implies that we focus on the effect of ritual on interactants, rather than examining the individual performing ritual practices (cf. Spencer-Oatey’s 2011 work on relationality). In a sense every ritual act has some relational function; the label ‘relational ritual’ is applied in this book as a collective term for ‘rituals approached from the perspective of interpersonal relating’.³ Nevertheless, the relational perspective implies some limitation of scope: the category of ‘relational rituals’ only includes those ritual practices which form or maintain relationships through interaction, for example a blessing or a curse is excluded from the analysis if it is a silent one, as it does not have any visible interactional impact on interpersonal relationships (cf. Chapter 6). The relational perspective also implies that the rituals studied here must be meaningful for their performers, i.e. it excludes ‘empty’, gratuitous performance, as is the case with rituals that have lost their practical significance. As Chapter 4 will argue, ritual practices usually have a distinct lifespan, which means that they ‘fade out’ after some time, and in the course of their disappearance they tend to become ‘empty’ rituals.⁴

In accordance with the discursive relational framework, this book focuses on language usage, and it approaches ritual as social action triggered by interactional practices (cf. Kádár and Haugh 2013). Describing language use in this way accords with the view of Clift et al. (2006):

Talk is [ ... ] a vehicle for social action; and also as a principal means by which social organization in person-to-person interaction is mutually constructed and sustained. (Clift et al. 2006: 5)

Interpreting ritual as social action implies diversity. As with any other social action, ritual practices are understood differently in situated contexts.

The discursive relational approach to rituals fills an important gap in the field because it integrates the phenomenon of ritual into a broader conceptualisation, which goes beyond traditional paradigms. Aspects of rituality have been discussed in various disciplines, including the humanities (e.g. anthropology, linguistics, history, game and play theory), and certain areas of social sciences including, for example, psychology.⁵ As this book will argue (see e.g. Chapters 4 and 6), the present framework is suitable for incorporating findings from several of these disciplines due to its focus on the relational aspect of rituality.

Although this book does pursue an interest in ritual per se, it focuses primarily on an important yet generally neglected discursive phenomenon which is described as ‘in-group ritual’. In-group ritual refers to the ritualised relational practices formed locally within the social unit of network. Since the term ‘network’ can take various interpretations, it is worth defining the meaning adopted in the present work. As Milroy and Milroy (1992: 2) claim, a “social network relates to the community and interpersonal level of social organization”; as Chapter 3 will argue, society is constituted through an intersecting nexus of relational networks. The concept of social network (which is used interchangeably with ‘group’ in this book) provides a useful unit of analysis to study discursively constructed practices of rituality because it allows us to approach rituality in a contextualised way, in accordance with the above-discussed view of ritual as social action. At the same time, the notion of social network helps the analyst to capture ritual in more settings than for example the notion of ‘community of practice’ (cf. Wenger 1998), which represents social networks primarily (but not exclusively) in the workplace.⁶

In terms of typology (cf. Chapter 4), the in-group rituals of relational networks represent a different type of ritual from practices which are conventionalised on a wider social level beyond single networks (this super-network type of ritual will henceforth be referred to as ‘social ritual’). In the present framework, the size of networks/groups can range from the traditional speaker–hearer dyad to much larger groups. In-group ritual practices come into existence if a relational network meets the following criteria: (a) all those engaging in ritual practices have in-group status; and (b) group members have accrued a necessary extent of relational history (see Sections 1.1.2 and 1.1.3).

The notion of locally situated rituals differing from established macro-level social rituals is not new: the phenomenon of locally practised ritual has been widely discussed in psychology and other behavioural disciplines (see Chapter 4 for an overview). It has also been addressed in various studies on language usage (cf. Chapter 3), though it has been approached under different labels (e.g. teasing, mocking, routines). There is an important exception, namely, Collins’ (2004) monograph, which theorises ritual on the micro-level. Whilst Collins’ sociological framework greatly inspired me, and various references will be made to it (see e.g. Chapter 5), it has a considerably different scope from the present work (which might be due to disciplinary differences). Collins pursues an interest in ritual as an object or idea which is emotionally charged and argues that individuals are, in a sense, interconnected through rituals, i.e. he approaches relationality from the perspective of ritual act as an entity. I, on the other hand, am more interested in relationality per se, i.e. my framework operates the other way around as I approach ritual as a social action from the perspective of relationships (and individual goals) which generate this action. The relational stance brings along some major differences between Collins’ and my conceptualisations of ritual; for example, an individual engaged in the performance of a relational ritual, unlike in the case of Collins’ ‘interaction ritual’, has a wide space to transform a ritual act according to her or his preferences; also, the relational approach calls for categorising ritual in radically different ways from sociology (see Section 1.3 and Chapter 2). Thus, a distinctive aspect of the present framework is that it captures various manifestations of the ritual phenomenon within the perspective of relational and ritual theories.

The coexistence of social rituals and in-group rituals is not contradictory: for example, Chapter 3 will illustrate that even in historical communities such as imperial China in which much importance was attached to socially conventionalised ritual, both social and in-group rituals used to be practised. Furthermore, as Chapter 2 will argue, these two types of rituality tend to intermix, for example social rituals may develop into in-group rituals (and vice versa).⁷

In what follows, I discuss how the present discursive and micro-level approach to ritual relates to previous theories of rituality, before providing a discursive-relational definition of ‘rituality’. An example of in-group ritual will be offered as an illustration.

1.1.1 Rituals: the narrow interpretation

Since the publication of Erving Goffman’s (1967) classic study Interaction Ritual (some essays of this work were published earlier, in the 1950s), ritual has been regarded as a pivotal relational phenomenon. Goffman aimed to translate traditional ethnographic concepts of ritual research “to grasp some aspects of urban secular living” (Goffman 1967: 95). Despite this innovative stance, ritual continues to be represented in the field of pragmatic studies in a somewhat traditional way; in fact, ritual is often used as an umbrella term for the conventionalised aspects of language usage (cf. Chapter 2), and it is regularly associated with certain speech acts, such as greetings, performed in specific institutional settings (see e.g. Rash 2004, Zhu 2005). Such a perception of rituality is problematic because it represents ritual as a rather specific and formalised aspect of language usage, and so it fails to capture its complex interactional and relational functions.

It can be argued that this view follows from a narrow interpretation of rituals as phenomena that are, of necessity, recognised by a society, or at least substantial groupings within a society, in order to qualify as rituals (see also Chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of this problem). This criterion of ‘public recognition’ can be encountered, for example, in the work of historians such as Norbert Elias ([1994] 2000). Defining rituality from a social-constitutive perspective also occurs, quite interestingly (and perhaps somewhat paradoxically), in theories such as Bell’s (1997: 43–6), which argues for a rethinking of the elusive notion of society in the context of ritual studies, and sees virtue in Douglas’s (1970) concept of ‘grid–group’ definition of societies.⁸ Furthermore, the restricted perspective can also be encountered in perceptive studies on ritual language use; Labov (1972), for one, has analysed ritual formats as widely used macro-level linguistic forms with ‘local’ (re-)interpretations and modifications. Such narrow interpretations of ritual are debatable since they are essentially at odds with discursive pragmatics in which the emphasis is on the micro-level analysis of pragmatic phenomena (cf. Mills 2011). Furthermore, a narrow sense interpretation of ritual creates an interdisciplinary gap between ritual as it is described in social studies and humanities, and its interpretations in other disciplines such as psychology (cf. Marks 1987, Poyurovsky et al. 2004; for more details see Chapter 4).

1.1.2 Definitions of ritual

With these limitations in mind, an alternative – and more extensive – definition for ritual is due. In order to provide such a discursive definition, it is necessary first to survey the most important properties of ritual behaviour, as represented by scholars from various disciplines such as anthropology, social history and historical pragmatics. It is also necessary to revisit a historical–anthropological notion, ‘deritualisation’ (the claim that rituals have become insignificant in modern globalised social life), which I have found problematic from a relational perspective. Such an overview is inevitably biased: as experts of ritual research have stated (see e.g. Bell 1997), ritual has many functions which no single theory can capture comprehensively, and the present framework is no exception.

From a Durkheimian vantage point, it can be argued that ever since the dawn of humankind, ritual has been a key social phenomenon because of its ‘survival value’, specifically its potential to enhance the establishment and reinforcement of interpersonal and/or intragroup relations (cf. Durkheim [1912] 1954; cf. Guttmann 2004 for an elaboration of the Durkheimian view). Given its mimetic (and iconic) make-up – i.e. relational ritual acts are imitative performances which facilitate interpersonal communication (cf. Chapter 2 on mimetic ritual performance and its different interpretations) – ritual favours survival in that it serves as a means of conflict resolution and avoidance. A ritualised utterance is a mimetic performance, which re-enacts certain social or interpersonal values, and as such it facilitates interaction; ritual thus comes into operation as memes, by transmitting cultural/societal/in-group ideologies (see more on this issue in Blackmore 2007). As Potolsky (2006: 160) notes, “mimesis [ ... ] is among the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Defining Ritual from a Relational Perspective
• 3. In-Group Ritual in Operation: Two Case Studies
• 4. Relational Ritual Typology
• 5. Recognition, Affectivity and Emotivity
• 6. Destructive Relational Rituals
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index