Ritual Analysis Essay Assignment
Due Feb. 7
Write a brief (about 4-5 pp.) essay that analyzes a contemporary cultural event or form as a ritual. (An example is below.) In other words, take an aspect of contemporary culture and describe it in such a way as to illuminate its symbolic, ritual, or mythic character. When writing your ritual analysis, it is useful to remember several things:
1.Thick Description: A ritual analysis is not just a step by step recounting of concrete events; it tries to reveal the many layers of meaning imbedded in cultural events and activities. A ritual analysis, moreover, does not simply name or list meanings ("the Superbowl was exciting") it shows them, it describes the processes and rules of meaning-making that the participants actively invoke. (Think of the difference between an eye twitch and a wink.) It is about symbolic codes and the ways that people actively make meanings with them. It helps to start with forms, with meaningful, repeated patterns of behavior or style.
2.Defamiliarization: A ritual analysis involves making the common seem uncommon, taking something from our culture's unquestioned stock of background knowledge and bringing it into the foreground, taking something we assume to be "given" or natural, and showing it to be socially constructed. Two tricks can help you achieve this. First, you can imagine yourself as a Martian anthropologist, trying to make sense of the peculiar activities of the naked apes that call themselves Americans. Second, you can try to reveal the underlying cultural codes by substituting characters and/or contexts in your mind. What would happen if, say, the men and women in your ritual reversed roles? If it happened in a symphonic concert hall instead of a stadium?
3. Connections to Social Power and Structure: A complete ritual analysis draws connections between the forms of the ritual itself and social structures and/or power. How do these rituals relate to social hierarchies of class, gender, or race? Who gains from these rituals, and who looses?
4.Style and Eloquence: A ritual analysis is about cultural forms, but it is also itself a cultural form, just like the fairy tale, the Gothic novel, the news story and the editorial. Just as the writing of a good news story or a good fairy tale involves craft, style, and imagination, so does a ritual analysis.
Here’s an example of student ritual analysis:
morin150