What is a ritual?
I spent this week doing the secondary readings to round out my foundational knowledge about rituals and autoethnography.
For this week, I read the forward and introduction of Catherine Bell’s “Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice” and half of Emily Chao’s “The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory.” My main takeaways from them are that rituals are multi-dimensional sensory experiences that can only exist within the context of the community members. Perhaps that is why a lot of rituals nowadays are not being celebrated by younger generations as the context around the festivals have changed to become something too foreign and alien. My full notes for the readings are as following:
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice - Foreword: Notes on a Friendship.”
Ritual is not a "thoughtless action stripped of context", but rather "a culturally strategic way of acting in the world" (vii)
"Ritual is a form of social activity" (vii)
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice - Introduction
Ritual is a lens in which we can use to analyze culture. - ritual as a tool for analysis
Rituals can be seen as a "window on the cultural dynamics by which people make and remake their worlds" (3)
What makes something a ritual?
How does ritual create, organize, and pass down knowledge?
What assumptions do we have about rituals?
Rituals can include practices & the social relationship that support them.
"Ritual as a form of social control". By determining who people should act, rituals create and maintain power structures.
1st half of The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory - Emily Chao
Events
There was a madman in the poor village of East Wind. A shaman was called to drive away the demons that lived inside him. She burned incense and set up colored flags to all upon the gods, all recognizable shamanic rituals. However, she imbued the text of her shamanic rituals with calls for Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. She "incorporated political slogans and phrases from the Chinese national anthem" (505). "The shaman grafted national discourse onto the local ritual structure in the context where there had formerly been a clear division between the state and the shamanic" (505). After the ritual ended, the collective reaction from the villagers can be described colloquially as "what the fuck is this shit?". Most villagers viewed her as a con woman looking to make a quick buck. Hell, she didn't even seem like the typical shaman they knew of. Not only was she not a man (lol), but she jammed nationalist propaganda into a village that wasn't that too into nationalism.
Notes
Most rituals studied in anthropology are "routinely performed and dramatize shared meaning and visions of reality" (505)
Failed rituals tend to not successfully reassert or transform the social order
Failed rituals can be used as a tool to analyze how a ritual is made legitimate and authentic - by studying what ritual is not, we can understand what ritual is.
Rituals only exist & thrive in context, ie. when it knows its audience
People don't like to continue a ritual if it comes with associations to a bad memory
When you re-contextualize a ritual or try to evolve it to its next iteration, the jump needs to make sense in the context of the cultural members.
The woman didn't know her audience, thus her shamanic ritual was not viewed as authentic
Local cultures are stronger than state views
Rituals can only live within their context and must be recognizable to cultural members. Essentially, the essence of it must be recognizable.
There is an expectation in rituals by viewing community members.
By combining shamanic discourse with state discourse, the woman made the ritual unfamiliar to viewing cultural members.
"The failure of the ritual...directs us to analyze the various forces that inspired doubt" (513)
"Processes of legitimization and authentication encompasses local dynamics, experiences of structural change, the significance of the ritual practice, and interpretations of new forms of power" (513)
I read “Autoethnography: An Overview” by Carolyn Ellis et al. to gain more of an understanding of how to write an autoethnography. Most of the stuff contained in the text I had already read about last week; however, it did get me started thinking about who I plan to get started on my own. To plan for this, I created a planning template in my Notion page using a modified version of the design ethnography template I found via the Design Research Lab from the Department of Humanities at the University of Trento in Italy. Citations are included below. I started filling it out, but haven’t completed it yet. My biggest takeaway from this exercise is that memories are fucking fuzzy. I don’t remember most of my childhood. I think that is most beneficial to me for starting this research is to create an outline of a typical Thai-Chinese News Years festival and then try to remember sometimes associated with each of those tangible points.
On a fun side note, I find that reading academic papers is an exercise of great patiences and tolerance, ie. I kind of hate it. It’s so dry, and while I am interested in the topic, I find the reading itself akin to slitting my wrists. I would really like to find other forms of media that I can use as research, because continuing reading academic papers will only inevitably make me more miserable and depressed. After listening to the presentations, I found myself more drawn to the illustration research that Rani is doing and that practice-based research is also something I want to do. I still want to investigate Chinese festivals, but I'm really not interested in the ritual aspect of it anymore if it involves a lot of reading. I would much rather do interviews and do the autoethnography. I like the illustration aspect as it’s something I’m also very interested in and it would be a practice-based research that I would be more interested in. I’ve always planned that the designs and deliverables I make next semester would involve both a digital version and an analog version. Perhaps the analog version is an illustrated zine of how to celebrate certain Chinese festivals. The digital version that I was dreaming about was something similar to https://designercize.com/, where a user can select a festival and the level of effort they want to celebrate it and the site will output a plan on how they can do that. That idea seems much more interesting to me.
Next Step:
Create an outline of a typical Thai-Chinese New Years festival
Read more into the history of Chinese New Years
Change my research question so that it doesn’t involve so much reading.
Citations:
Busciantella Ricci, Daniele, and Ilaria Argenziano. “Design Ethnography Plan.” DRLab, Design Research Lab - Department of Humanities - University of Trento, Mar. 2020, https://drlab.unitn.it/en/design-ethnography-plan/.
Bell, Catherine M. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Chao, Emily. “The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 4, 1999, pp. 505–534. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1999.14.4.505. Accessed 9 Oct. 2021.