ttitude is to our
collective health and sanity.
Unit One Notes: Week Two
Keywords for week two:
ingenuity and the ingenuity gap ritual structure and anti-structure compassion fatigue liminality
1. Context and perspective: ritual and media studies
a. what is ritual?
The dictionary describes ritual as “an established and prescribed pattern of
observance, for example, in a religion”; alternately, ritual is “the performance of actions
or procedures in a set, ordered, and ceremonial way.” In a more secular sense, and
with respect to ritual’s presence in the larger culture, ritual is a pattern or conventional
set of practices by which we bring ourselves into contact with our society’s most
important values, meanings, and transformative experiences. Rituals bond us with
thousands at a football game or with dozens in an AA meeting; they invite divinity into
our hearts, or banish demons from the sick and the possessed; they transform us from
single to married, sick to healthy, or living to dead. Rituals do the heavy lifting in
culture, reconciling people and the fundamental premises by which their lives are
ordered.
One of the founders of ritual studies—the discipline concerned to study ritual and
culture—is anthropologist Victor Turner. In his 1969 book, The Ritual Process, Turner
explained the rudiments of ritual across cultures, be they exotic and distant or familiar
and North American. All rituals, 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】whether baptisms, sorority rituals, or even the
ritualized performance of media commentators and their audiences as both convene on either side of a television, have three essential parts. These three are: (i) separation; (ii)
the liminal phase; and (iii) integration.
Separation and integration are the simplest in nature, and also similar in design. One
leaves one’s formal or everyday identity in separation, taking on a new persona in the
ritual. In integration, the process is reversed, but the person reenters the world of
structure—the normal state of being—with a new role, experience, or perspective.
Rituals don’t have to change people, and indeed their function may be to restore order
and preserve the status quo. But most rituals to a greater or lesser degree bring people
into the presence of some of the most powerful experiences and meanings available in
culture, and therein effect a transformation.
This in-between space is called in Turner’s writings the “liminal,” and the condition of
being liminal is called “liminality.” Liminal derives from the Latin word for “threshold,”
and the liminal is what we pass into once we cross the threshold of the normal,
structured, ordinary world. The pleasures of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia or J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series lie, for example, in the liminal worlds the characters inhabit set apart
from the dreary reality of everyday England. Drug-taking and religious experience are
equally atte
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