see dimensions of the significance and efficacy of ritual activity that were not so obvious in the classic examples of the previous section.

In particular, these examples of ritual-like behavior demonstrate the importance of the body and its way of moving in space and time. The body acts within an environment that appears to require it to respond in certain ways, but this environment is actually created and organized precisely by means of how people move around it. The complex reciprocal interaction of the body and its environment is harder to see in those classic examples of ritual where the emphasis on tradition and the enactment of codified or standardized actions lead us to take so much for granted about the way people actually do things when they are acting ritually. If examples of ritual-like activity can throw light on what goes into the activities of ritualizing, they may also clarify the significance of the distinctions people draw between various types of activities, including ritual and non-ritual actions. However ritual-like heavyweight boxing may appear to be at times, for most people it is not the same thing as Sunday church service, and the differences are far from unimportant to them. In contrast to those in the previous section, the examples explored here will tend to be somewhat less established as public events, less codified by tradition, and less likely to appeal to divine beings. Yet they have all been deemed ritual or ritual-like on occasion, and their proximity to more conventional examples of ritual effectively informs our general cultural understanding of what ritual basically means to us.

Formalism

Formality is one of the most frequently cited characteristics of ritual, even though it is certainly not restricted to ritual per se. In fact, as a quality, formality is routinely understood in terms of contrast and degree. That is, formal activities set up an explicit contrast with informal or casual ones; and activities can be formalized to different extents. In general, the more formal a series of movements and activities, the more ritual-like they are apt to seem to us. When analyzed, formality appears to be, at least in part, the use of a more limited and rigidly organized set of expressions and gestures, a “restricted code” of communication or behavior in contrast to a more open or “elaborated code.”4 Formal speech, for example, tends to be more conventional and less idiosyncratic or personally expressive. Likewise, formal gestures are fewer in number than informal ones and are more prescribed, restrained, and impersonal. By limiting or curbing how something can be expressed, restricted codes of behavior simultaneously influence what can be expressed as well. The injunction to speak politely at formal events means that people tend to avoid frank discussions of topics about which they personally care a great deal; they tend to stick to more standard opinions on more impersonal subjects. And if personal political positions should become the topic on such an occasion, one is less likely to hear emotional or abusive characterizations of opposing positions, although sarcasm and wit can have the same effect without violating the formality of the situation. For the most part, high degrees of formality force people to state or affirm very generalized and rather impersonal sentiments about relatively abstract concerns.

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Formalization, it has been argued, is very effective in promoting a loose social acquiescence to what is going on.5 While people might challenge the expression of specific or concrete ideas, they tend not to challenge the routine expression of formulas or clichés. As we saw earlier, Maurice Bloch has made this argument most clearly in regard to the power of formal oratory in securing social control among the

Merina of Madagascar. On ritual occasions, village elders adopt a mode of formalized oratory that differs from everyday speech in numerous ways, notably loudness, intonation, syntactic forms, limited vocabulary, and the fixity of the order and style.6 Bloch found that what can be said in this formalized way is quite limited, and as a mode of communication that is stylistically very determined, oratory can appear to be all style and no content. Yet in that quality may lie its effectiveness: if people do not bother to challenge the style, they are effectively accepting the content. In other words, formalized speech appears to induce acceptance, compliance, or at least forbearance with regard to any overt challenge. For Bloch, “the formalisation of language is a way whereby one speaker can coerce the response of another. . . . It is really a type of communication where rebellion is impossible and only revolution could be feasible.”7 For example, if a person unconventionally addresses an accidentally assembled audience, in the manner that a street preacher might stake out a city corner and begin to preach hellfire and damnation, the informality of the preacher’s position invites reactions to its content and its style. However, if an invited speaker addresses an intentionally assembled audience and proceeds according to the conventions of a formal lecture, one cannot informally break in to challenge the content without challenging the whole event; in such cases, most people will tolerate the talk by accepting the conventions of the event for the time being. Those who do attempt to challenge the content, and thus the whole event, are forced into the position of disruptive hecklers.

Generally, formalization forces the speaker and the audience into roles that are more difficult to disrupt. For this reason, Bloch finds that highly formalized ways of speaking and communicating tend to be closely connected with traditional forms of social hierarchy and authority, effectively maintaining the implicit assumptions on which such authority is based. In other words, formality most often reinforces the larger social status quo. It may be for this reason that many types of social, political, and artistic challenges to the content of the status quo have felt it necessary to challenge simultaneously the conventions of polite speech and conduct, no matter how minor such challenges might seem. Indeed, those making such challenges are apt to be dismissed as extremists or quacks because they challenge style as much as content, and such dismissals further insulate the community from taking such challenges seriously. For example, early feminist critiques of the social order pointed to how the male gesture of holding a door for a woman, while courteous and well-meaning, effectively promoted ideas that reinforced very constrained and traditional views of women as weak and in need of both protection and deference. Feminists began to refuse to enter doors held open by men, while men complained that they did not understand why women should be so touchy about such a small display of conventional civility. Yet gradually this little social ritual has been redefined as a more generalized courtesy: whoever reaches the door first, male or female, now tends to hold it open for the other, or the able-bodied adult holds it for children, the elderly and the infirm.

Formality, therefore, is not necessarily empty or trivial. As a restricted code of behavior, formalized activities can be aesthetically as well as politically compelling, invoking what one analyst describes as “a metaphoric range of considerable power, a simplicity and directness, a vitality and rhythm.”8 The restriction of gestures and phrases to a small number that are practiced, perfected, and soon quite evocatively familiar can endow these formalized activities with great beauty and grace. Indeed, mechanical or routinized action is not what we usually mean by formality because they lack just this aesthetic dimension. In addition, it appears that formalized activities can communicate complex sociocultural messages very economically, particularly messages about social classification, hierarchical relationships, and the negotiation of identity and position in the social nexus.9 For the sociologist Erving Goffman, human interchange is a matter of ordered sequences of symbolic communication, which he calls “interaction rituals” or “ritual games.” The limited and highly patterned nature of these interactions serves the purpose of creating a self that can be constructed only with the cooperative help of some and the contrasting foil provided by others. In effect, Goffman suggests, one constructs one’s identity, or “face,” as a type of sacred object constituted by the ritual of social exchange.10 The social construction of self-images and their relations with other self-images generates a total “ritual order,” he argues, that is, a system of communication that deals not with facts but with understandings and interpretations, as well as “blindnesses, half-truths, illusions, and rationalizations.” The organization of social encounters into various formal acts and events trains people to be “self-regulating participants” who live by a set of moral and social rules that define what it means to be human in a particular culture.11 In a related definition of ritual, Goffman suggests that perfunctory and conventional acts are the way in which individuals express respect for “some object of ultimate value,” such as the personhood of another or the whole edifice of codified social relations.12

Gestures of greeting or parting are formal conventions for social interaction, often considered “patterned routines,” miniature rituals, or systems of signs that convey symbolic information.13 They are frequently described as ritual by virtue of an implicit contrast between their communication of symbolic information and more utilitarian modes of transmitting factual information. The person who answers the question “How do you do?” with a factual account, for example, has either misunderstood the situation or is deliberately breaking the rules of polite discourse. Symbolically, however, such rituals of greeting and parting can communicate a great deal.14 Greetings express and affirm the existence of an acceptable social relationship rather than a mere physical proximity that can threaten aggression. Indeed, greetings identify both parties as social entities that have some form of social relationship and status vis-à-vis each other, either as equals or superior to inferior. In this way, very simple forms of greeting can invoke principles that underlie a whole system of social configurations, a system that can at times control the actors more than they control it.15

Most greetings and farewells, in fact, vividly illustrate some version of the dominant social hierarchy. The more elaborate and formalized the greeting or farewell, the more it calls attention to the relative social status of the parties. In this way, such conventions appear to function like complex rituals by clarifying the social order and, at times, effecting subtle manipulations in that order. The vassal who greeted his lord

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by falling to his knees, removing his hat, dropping his gaze, and pressing his hand against his breast left no ambiguity as to who was who in that social situation. Neither does the Brahman who leaves payment on the ground for a hired untouchable instead of handing it to him directly. In situations where social equality is stressed, however, everyone will be greeted in a similar fashion irrespective of rank, seniority, profession, or gender, as seen in the use of “citizen” to replace titles in postrevolutionary France or “comrade” after the revolutions in the former USSR, China, and

Cuba.

Our sense of the ritual-like nature of gestures of greeting and farewell also derives from the way these involve bodily as well as verbal modes of expression. Sometimes a greeting or parting may be nothing more than a brief body movement, as in the wave of a hand or the mute anjali used in South Asia, in which the hands are clasped in a prayer position in front of the chest as one bows slightly. In these cases, the body is an especially expressive and communicative instrument. A Japanese language teacher tried to make this point for a class of American students when he demonstrated how to say “thank you” in Japanese. It is not enough to say the words correctly, he contended; to articulate “Domo arigato” without the correct bobbing of the head and torso would be to say it incorrectly, rudely, or even incomprehensibly. This lesson is further illustrated by watching some people talk on public telephones: in the case of a Japanese man talking to his boss, he still uses his whole body, bowing in deference, sagging and straightening while listening, then bobbing up and down in final agreement.16

Although greetings and farewells are themselves formalizations of social conversation and interaction, there can be great differences in the degree of formality.

“Hi,” “hello,” and “how do you do” represent three different levels of formality that the socially trained English-speaker knows how to deploy in the appropriate situation. That is, despite the restrictions inherent in conventions of formality, such activities as handshakes, farewell speeches, and verbal greetings can all be performed with a great deal of personal expressiveness; one can personalize or nuance the conventional meanings attached to these actions. A handshake in which one person reluctantly offers just the fingertips, pumps the other’s hand aggressively, or squeezes it with a playful wink all communicate important variations on the social message of

“it is nice to meet you.”

Table manners are another obvious area of activity formalized according to cultural conventions that bear only indirect links to the utilitarian purpose of getting nourishment into one’s stomach.17 As one commentator states, “We turn the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon.”18

For these reasons, table etiquette and most other forms of socially polite behavior are readily considered ritual-like in nature. While it is clear that table manners are rule-governed, a category considered separately in this chapter, a striking aspect of table rituals and many other forms of social etiquette is the variability of formality. There are rules for how to set a table, serve the food, and handle the implements, but the rules are not hard and fast. Despite a few constants, such as not eating and speaking at the same time and minimal use of one’s fingers, the rules that apply in any one situation vary according to the desired degree of formality of the meal and its larger context. In some social systems, the rules of etiquette may be very elabo-

rate, often acting to demarcate class boundaries and discourage transgression of them.

In other societies, there may be attempts to relax and democratize such practices, which was the impulse behind Eleanor Roosevelt’s Book of Common Sense Etiquette and other mid-twentieth-century American guides.19

Limiting acceptable behavior to a relatively few culturally standardized options can create distinctions among dining situations and, of course, among social groups.20

The same group of people may eat hot dogs at the beach with very different rules of dining etiquette than they would use at an elaborate dinner banquet, but some groups who pride themselves on their intrinsic good manners or sense of style might well dine as formally at the beachfront as others would in the most exclusive dining room. As in many ritual situations, the more intimate the social relationships that are involved, the more casual the behavior. So a mother feeding a child on her lap is apt to ignore the usual table etiquette, but a group of relative strangers dining together tend to be more scrupulous. The greater the social distance experienced or desired between persons, the more their activities abide by those conventions that acknowledge social distance. Likewise, however, dropping some of these conventions can collapse some of the social distance and alter the relationships.

Like ritual, the formality of table etiquette conveys symbolic messages—about social class, the mannered person’s place in and attitudes toward the hierarchy of social classes, and his or her understanding of the specific social situation. Table etiquette, for example, as the transfer of general principles of formal etiquette to the table, effectively demarcates the situation of dining from other forms of social activity, differentiating the table as a distinct ceremonial arena. In this way, table manners signal the social importance of eating and give social significance to how one eats. Thus, as many analysts have noted, the formalization of ingestion into a series of organized conventions governing every aspect of the physical process serves to blur distinctions between what is physical and what is social. Only under special duress, such as famine, war, or illness, is the mere consumption of food more important than sitting correctly at the table and eating a meal properly! Indeed, there is a long-standing cultural belief that table manners indicate not just the quality of one’s upbringing but also one’s moral or spiritual disposition as well.21 This can become quite explicit in the social training of children, where the social codes they are taught to obey are seen not simply as “mere” conventions but also as intrinsically necessary social practices that civilize the wild brute lurking in all of us. In this way, the ritual-like qualities of table manners effectively disguise the basic arbitrariness of the cultural conventions of etiquette, and eating a meal properly reinforces the whole sociocultural edifice of the status, symbols, and ideologies. Yet, as in most ritual, formalization is not inflexible, and there are multiple ways in which the conventions of table etiquette are manipulated to create other highly nuanced messages, including ones that may fundamentally challenge the conventional social values expressed with knife and fork.

Table manners and dining rituals vary greatly from one culture to another and from one historical epoch to another. The feudal society of medieval Europe, which is generally understood to have had more religious and political ritual than the modern secular states in Europe and America, in fact contained far fewer rituals of etiquette than society today. The locus of most ritual activity in a society, whether it be the

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church or the dining room, is indicative of larger cultural forces. According to the classic study of Norbert Elias, the emergence of the concept of civilité and the social conventions of so-called civilized behavior specifically arose in the transition from the medieval world to early modern Europe. Elias correlated the emergence of centralized national states with the rearrangements of social relationships promoted by new rites of social etiquette. This was also a transition from forms of external social control, seen in the rites of church and state, to forms of internal self-control expressed in the ritual-like conventions of good manners.22 In this process, the conventions of etiquette and good behavior, while culturally determined and socially acquired, became internalized as the compelling means by which individuals regulate themselves in order to participate in an ordered hierarchy of social classes. The social training and psychological development of the child are organized to effect this internalization of social norms as self-control.23 As noted previously, more than a few scholars correlate the emergence of moral systems of values and ideas with the formulation and educational transmission of the proper use of table implements, although in some cultures the connection between etiquette and morality can be closer than in others.24 Certainly the internalization of values of self-control that socialize the individual as a member of a group or class is one reason why formal modes of behavior are apt to strike us as ritual-like.

Any modern American guide to table manners and general social etiquette, such as Emily Post’s Etiquette or Amy Vanderbilt’s New Complete Book of Etiquette, makes an explicit distinction between informal and formal entertaining. They all carefully spell out the differences between an informal and formal dinner party, luncheon, tea, cocktail party, and so on—and the differences among them are basic to how each is defined.25 That is, a formal occasion can be appreciated or “read” as such only if one understands what is formal about it, namely, how it contrasts with an informal occasion and what the contrasts are meant to communicate. In this way, formalization is a way of acting that actively heightens the specialness of a situation and its concomitant contrasts with less special events. The ease with which one simple gesture can heighten or diminish formality—such as the way in which one person greets another—parallels the way in which similar gestures can set a ritual situation off from daily routines or integrate it with those routines. Hence, the ritual-like nature of formality draws our attention to the way in which the contrasts with other activities— implicit and explicit, delicately signaled or dramatically marked—are intrinsic to the very construction of ritual activities. Further, formalization as the use of restricted codes of speech and movement also suggests some of the ways in which ritual can engage consent and promote the internalization of overarching social values by means of fairly discrete and specific acts. The type of formalization seen in gestures of politeness and table etiquette, however, reminds us that although codes for valueladen behavior exist as cultural conventions and expectations, they are eminently open to manipulation, appropriation, and nuance; in matters of etiquette and ritual, people do not just follow rules. Moreover, the processes for internalizing and deploying ritual knowledge and values are doubtless far from perfectly reliable, and most people’s sense of ritual behavior is probably no more uniform than the spectrum of attitudes toward table manners.