Purification ritual and media ritual
by sourceofdance
Whitney Houston on Oprah: a very short comment
To Richard Schechner, “ritual has been considered: 1) as part of the evolutionary development of animals; 2) as structures with formal qualities and definable relationships; 3) as symbolic system of meaning; 4) as performative actions or processes; 5) as experiences.”[1]
Prior to Schechner, Victor Turner – among others – has worked with this concept. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Turner discusses his own previous definition of the term in the light of the thought of other anthropologists:
“In earlier publications I defined ‘ritual’ as a ‘prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects’ (…) I still find this definition operationally useful despite Sir Edmund Leach, and other anthropologists of his ilk, who would eliminate the religious component and regard ritual as ‘stereotyped behavior which is potent in itself in terms of the cultural conventions of the actors, though not potential in a rational-technical sense’ and which serves to communicate information about a culture’s most cherished values.”[2]
Turner states that this expanded, not necessarily religion-related definition opens one’s mind to think ritual as performance, understanding ritual as a process made of a frame (rules) and actions that transcend this frame.[3]
Following this path, Nick Couldry enumerates two relevant aspects of ritual: formalized action, that is, doing things in a certain pre-established way, and action involving transcendent values, as in sacred ceremonies.[4] Couldry conveys an aspect of ritual that would be very appropriate to analyze Whitney Houston’s interview to Oprah: media ritual. “Media rituals are any actions organized around key media-related categories and boundaries whose performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the underlying ‘value’ expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre”[5] According to Couldry, media rituals reinforce the myth (in Barthesian sense) of mediated centre, the belief or assumption that the world has a social centre and the mass media “speaks for that centre”[6]. This myth lies in the very centre of media’s self-maintenance instinct.
[1] Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual, (London, Routledge: 1993), 228.
[2] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York, PAJ Publications: 1982), 79.
[3] Ibid, ibidem.
[4] Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, (London, Routledge: 2003), 3. An article by Couldry, “Media Rituals, Beyond Functionalism” is included in the anthology Media Anthropology edited by Eric W. Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman. I decided to use Couldry’s book in order to have a deeper understanding of rituals in media.
[5] Ibid, 2.
[6] Ibid, ibidem.
