Full Description
Ritual is popularly associated with ceremonies, though in real life it plays a significantly more important role, reinforcing what people perceive as the appropriate moral order of things, or challenging what they perceive as the inappropriate flow of events. This book introduces the reader to how people use ritual in interpersonal interaction and the interface that exists between ritual and politeness and impoliteness. As rituals have a large impact on the life of people and communities, the way in which they use politeness and impoliteness in a ritual action significantly influences the way in which the given ritual is perceived. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual examines this complex relationship by setting up a multi-layered analytic model, with a multidisciplinary approach which will appeal to interaction scholars, politeness researchers, social psychologists and anthropologists, and moral psychologists. It fills an important knowledge gap and provides the first (im)politeness-focused interactional model of ritual.
Contents
Preface; 1. Introduction; Part I. Ritual and (Im)Politeness - the Basic Relationship: 2. Ritual: its definition, typology and relational role; 3. Ritual and politeness research; 4. Ritual and (im)politeness: the basic relationship; Part II. Ritual, (Im)Politeness, and Moral Aggression: 5. Rites of moral aggression in operation: countering the heckler, and bystander intervention; 6. Voicing the moral order(s) in ritual aggression: morality and/versus (im)politeness in the rite of bystander intervention; 7. De/Ratifying the maintenance/maintainer of the moral order: moral responsibility in events of heckling; 8. Conclusion.
