Rituals

I can’t say whether it is because I am sleep deprived, whether I am accustomed to emotional pressure points instigated by something so slight and fleeting as television commercials, or whether the first reading, School as a Ritual Performance, both set the stage and wore me out, but reading Before the Bleach Gets Us All, succeeded in making me tear up on cue. Michelle Fine writes:

“It is in this moment that the tears of the ethnographer fall too easily, when after a protracted conversation about race and power, John, a young man I had ‘coded’ as middle-class and Black, offered, ‘These conversations are very hard for me. I understand both points of view. You all think I’m Black, but actually my mom is White and I could take either position in the room. But I don’t talk much because I don’t think anyone will catch my back.’ His eyes fill with tears as do those of many others in the room. There is a stunning silence. ‘I just felt confused’” (176).

And so I cried while reading this bit. And then again when Fine recounts the situation in which the three boys choose high honors and the teacher acts violently towards them, hurts them, and the Black students accept it.

In trying to figure out why these parts of the passages evoked a strong emotional response on my part, I think it has something to do with the rituals I engaged with in my own experience in a different high school in New Jersey—rituals by which apathy and perfecting the art of inauthentic engagements became a tool for survival. The rawness of the first instance, of John’s vulnerability within the classroom was something that never, or rarely, survived the initiation ritual we were submerged in upon entering high school; the rules of the ritual dictated that we harden ourselves to our selves and thus to others, acknowledge that teachers would condescended and that we must encourage one another not to care, ever. It felt alienating, and I remember feeling so removed and distant from myself while in school. School became a symbol of a ritual by which we totally opened ourselves up to abuse and learned how to take it, how to fake it. Fine’s piece articulated what I missed and what I experienced in a way that caught me off guard. Peter McLaren identifies my experience early on in his piece—school as a ritual of “bearing up under pain.”

While I anticipated McLaren’s piece to delve into a study of what a ritual in a school might look like, his analysis of the space the study of the ritual exists within, is, I believe, more telling as far as understanding the implications of something being recognized as a ritual (instead of as a natural part of the way things are).

McLaren writes: “The logic of autonomy and materiality of a ritual are always linked to macro relations of power and privilege and to the logic of capital (50).” Rituals come from and foster constructions of power; they are conglomerates of symbols which impart something important, something smelling of transcendence, upon those who “choose” to participate. McLaren identifies that what has been popularly granted the status of ritual is that which exists in the drudges, the backwaters of our evolved world—“the sociologically aberrant cases as youth countercultural movements, the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, or the spontaneous candlelight liturgies to mark the death of John Lennon”…the exclusive possession of those who are stuck in a “milieu of make-believe” (20).

If, as McLaren asserts, rituals play a central role in the construction of the way we think about ourselves and our positioning within our communities, as well as in the maintenance of those constructions, why does it become important to understand why sociologists and anthropologists have not identified the stuff of everyday life in our contemporary world as an interplay of rituals? What kind of ritual is herein being practiced? In what/whose interest?

McLaren identifies a key characteristic of the ritual as entailing an intention of “transcendence,” of transitioning the players from one state to another, of passing on some type of knowledge by which those involved are framed, or reframed within their social contexts. A ritual exerts and plays with a certain kind of power. What would be the benefit of denying the existence of ritual among everyday things, like school, or politics, or sex? If it’s not a ritual, then what is it?

Containing ritual within an past primitivism—when societies were dictated and formed by fluctuating, subjective social forces, such as blood ties—creates the suggestion of a modern space that is instead created and maintained by the object and natural and amoral forces of non-ritualistic things like the market or the contract. This implies that there is no subjective hand wielding power within a society. Ritual carries the connotation of intention, and this is endemic to those who wish to present the conditions of society as “just the way things are.” The construction of the hyperreality (Disneyland) which Baudrillard identifies, is here in play.

Does school not also carry the theme of transcendence? Are we not supposed to graduate armed with a certain set of knowledge and ideas befit to our survival in a new world? Why would schools not be recognized as a space centrally designed for the practice of various interconnected rituals?

The thanksgiving ritual for example: the ritual of consciously constructing the myth of a happy gathering and peaceful co-existence between the pilgrims and the natives, with the intentions of later explaining what really happened—why does this ritual exist? Why does the school perform a ritual of perpetuating a lie, and then perform the ritual of enlightening?

By identifying something as ritual, the space is created to construct counter-rituals, and thus the formations of counter cultures, of new constructions.